In Angel Eyes, Jennifer Lopez plays Sharon, a Chicago cop who silences talkative perps by slamming their faces onto the hood of the police car. Can you say “Police brutality?” Sharon leaps tall fences, chases thugs halfway across the city, and makes her male colleagues look like pansies. This means she has issues and should check into an anger management program; in Hollywood logic, a tough woman has to have some kind of psychological problem.
Soon we find that her problem has to do with her dysfunctional family. (News flash: All families are dysfunctional. It’s called “normal.”) She grew up with an abusive father and a punching bag/doormat mother. And they want her to come to their 30th wedding anniversary and renewal of vows. You can tell that Sharon is troubled because every time she encounters family members, she has that look that announces, “I am fighting back tears.” Sharon’s story is nowhere near interesting enough to merit a full-length feature film, but the producers figure that the audience will buy anything with J. Lo in it. Wrong. The audience may have demonstrated a lack of discretion in the past, but it does have minimum requirements. Like a plot. Conflict. If not realistically-drawn characters, then sympathetic ones. In short, a movie. Angel Eyes is not a movie, it’s a vehicle for J. Lo, who should perhaps use her clout to develop film projects that will allow her to work with top-notch professionals, the kind who can actually say, “J. Lo, this script reeks.” It should be noted that before Jennifer Lopez became a pop phenomenon, she worked with filmmakers like Bob Rafelson, Oliver Stone and Steven Soderbergh. Their projects did not make the kind of money that her disposable flicks (The Cell, Wedding Planner) did. Also, J. Lo can’t sing, but her album was a huge hit. Figure it out.
Back to the movie. Sharon is followed around by a tall, cute, unshaven guy in a long coat. Can you say “Stalker?” The stalker, Catch (Jim Caviezel), has spooky blue eyes, presumably the ones referred to in the title. We are made to believe that he is some kind of supernatural creature, like a ghost or an angel (duh), because he wears that blasted coat all the time, does nice things for the neighbors, has no surname, and does not turn up in official records. In fact the reason we went to see this movie in the first place was because the trailer, poster, and newspaper features led us to believe it was a supernatural thriller, like The Sixth Sense. Imagine our disappointment when we realized that the protagonists were not dead. There’s nothing paranormal about the way they first meet, either.
Catch beholds Sharon in the window of a club, and is so smitten by her that he immediately risks getting himself killed to save her life. Naturally Sharon falls for the mysterious stranger, conveniently forgetting that he was the same guy she rescued from a car wreck in an earlier scene. Soon we see why Sharon is not a detective: she constantly declares how curious she is about Catch’s personal history, but it never occurs to her to run a check on him. Hello, you’re in the police department and it’s the wired era. But Catch proves his memory is even worse than Sharon’s. He forgets that he can play the trumpet until they wander into a jazz club where he steps onstage and does a professional-sounding rendition of Nature Boy. I don’t know what the etiquette among musicians is, but I suspect they don’t appreciate having their set interrupted by some stranger who uses their instrument without permission. Pianos, maybe, but not instruments with spit valves.
In deference to J. Lo’s male fans, there is a love scene. It’s by a river, and J. Lo seems to be doing abdominal crunches while Caviezel spots her. Hey, it is possible for two good-looking actors to have no chemistry between them whatsoever. When Sharon finally discovers what Catch’s real name is, she visits his abandoned house and finds everything covered in dust, including a moldy birthday cake. Chicago must be a really nice place to live, because the house has been deserted for a long time, and nothing has been stolen.
The supernatural thriller turns out to be an amateur therapy session as Sharon and Catch confront their issues by making sappy speeches designed to make the audience weep. Are you kidding? Catch makes his speech to a grave, while Sharon delivers hers to a video camera at her parents’ party. Their soul-baring is so bogus, they can only do it to inanimate objects. It’s all supposed to be cathartic and liberating, but all we get is actors swallowing their own snot. In the end you know that “Everything Will Be Okay” because Catch has shaved and ditched the coat, while Sharon is wearing a dress. They get into an SUV, and to emphasize his sudden dramatic recovery, Catch drives. Wait until they realize that in order for their paths to cross, his entire family had to perish.
As the scene shifted to happy-ending hazy-blue, I hoped the director Luis Mandoki would try to redeem his movie by making the SUV crash into a truck. No such luck. As the end credits roll, we discover that Angel Eyes is a horror flick after all: Sharon’s doormat mother is played by the formerly fabulous Brazilian star, Sonia Braga. Eek!
