Eye of the Beholder

"Beauty," so goes the password for the surveillance agent code-named the Eye (Ewan McGregor, who looks as if he'd spent a long time in a room smoking cigarettes), "is in the eye of the beholder." For Stephan Elliott (Priscilla Queen of the Desert), who adapted Eye of the Beholder from the Marc Behm novel, beauty seems to consist of how many ways you can shoot a transition from one American city to another through a snow globe. That's a lot of snow globes, as the Eye chases vampy serial killer Joanna Eris (Ashley Judd, minus whatever it is that made Double Jeopardy an unlikely hit) from Washington, DC, to Butthole, Alaska, in a ludricrously stylized and clumsily incoherent psychological thriller that looks as if it might have been started and abandoned by Brian De Palma in 1978.

Why is the Eye so worked up about Joanna? Beats me -- she's just a tiresome cliché with bad taste in wigs whose penchant is doing away with wealthy, disagreeable men and making off with their booty. Some effort is made to fill in the Eye's background -- his wife and child left him for some reason -- but that's just an excuse for Elliott to indulge in the fancy but tedious computer effects that should have been history when movies like The Net bombed big-time. As for Joanna, she's just a lost little girl whose daddy abandoned her at Christmas. More a self-indulgence than an exploration of voyeurism or obsession, this should all be gone in the blink of an eye. At the Holiday, Showcase, and Woonsocket cinemas.
-- Peter Keough