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Jessica Alba plays Sydney Wells, a young girl who gets more than she bargained for when she receives a corneal transplant.

Jessica Alba delivers a decent, if somewhat lacking, performance in the Eye, a remake of a Japanese horror flick of the same name. Jessica’s character Sydney Wells, a beautiful and talented first chair violinist who has been blind since childhood, receives a corneal transplant. Everything starts out nicely, until she starts to see shadows in her vision. At first only blurs, these visions quickly become terrifying. Sydney sees dead people, in post-mortem spirit form, being led away from their bodies by smoky spirits. She also gets haunted by spirits; such as a little boy who follows her around her apartment hallways, asking her if she has seen his report card over and over again.

  She begins to freak out a bit at this point. Her sister barely even pays attention to her, let alone offers sympathy. Maybe that’s because she was the one to cause her blindness as a child, although that detail is never really explored. Her sister is played by Parker Posey, even though you would never know because her acting talents are never put to use in this film. Sydney begins to have terrible flashback like dreams, where she is burning, or hunted for witchcraft. She soon wonders if this could be because of her eyes, but her therapist continues to try and tell her it is only her imagination.

Her therapist/doctor Paul is played by Alessandro Nivola, and exhibits about as much personality and emotion as a plaster wall. At times it seemed like they were trying to play on the emotional relationship angle between him and Alba, and at others the heroic pity on the female character role. No matter what he was supposed to be for her, his character was unsympathetic, uncaring, and as flat as the aforementioned wall. Paul’s role served more as a background role than anything, which was fine since I wanted to strangle his character whenever he was on screen.

Eventually Sydney realizes that her donated eyes came from a girl who had prophetic visions of upcoming danger- yet no one would believe the poor girls warnings about a fire that was going to consume them. The tradgedy still happened, and the girl committed suicide out of grief. How her eyes would be donated is really beyond me- but hey it fits in the movie plot. Her psychic visions being passed on, Sydney also sees visions of consuming fire accidents- some past and some about to happen. The climax of the movie is when she actually saves the victims from the accident before it happens- a wreck involving and oil truck that causes a huge fire in the middle of a traffic jam- and in the midst of being the heroin glass gets into her eyes and BAM she is once again blind. With things back to normal, she assumes the life she led before the operation.

The movie had interesting scary scenes, although they were the ones you could see from a mile away, and relied more on flashes of ghosts and presumed dead people following her around. Alba played a very convincing role- you could see her emotion on her face and almost feel her frustration and grief. But her role alone could not make this film amazing. The other characters are flat, and the plot is very unbelievable.

Like The Grudge, The Ring, and others, this film is one of many in the trend of American copies of Japanese horror flicks. It’s almost become a disease in Hollywood. The first two Eye films out of Japan are kind of similar in plot, but the Japanese horror films use more story telling, more suspense to keep you enthralled. The American version borrows some of the story plot, but they throw special effects all over the place. They look pretty, but it gives me the impression that we need effects to be scared.

Like in the third Eye (10th installment in Japan- I am not sure if there are 10 total or not), the Pang brothers take a new direction. The brothers Pang directed the first two Eyes in Japan, and while those films dealt more in the spooky ghost story, the Eye 3 gives the series a teen horror comedy edge. It begins nicely, following teens who decide to tell each other ghost stories after witnessing an accident. They follow directions they find in a book which tells you how to see spirits- and it works. The rest of the movie is like a game of tag with ghosts. This film is not one that will give you nightmares, but it is definitely worth watching. There is something to be said about Japanese horror flicks, that just can not be copied. Translated, maybe, but loosely. They Eye 3 is really more humor than horror, but the effects are nice and you get enough scares and laughs to entertain.

If you want good Japanese horror movie scares, go watch Eye 1 and 2. If you want a laughable scary movie, the American Eye or the Japanese Eye 3 are good choices.

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