Secret in Their Eyes joins a long list of Hollywood remakes of foreign films that are both bland retellings and also have audiences asking the question, “Why?” Despite having the fine pedigree of Oscar nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor and Oscar winners Julia Roberts and Nicole Kidman, the film feels flat, hallow emotionally and believe it or not, lazy.
The film time shifts throughout, going from events of early 2002 and today. It focuses on a team of investigators who are a group of promising up-and-comers charged with helping fight the so-called “War on Terror.” As Ejiofor’s Ray and Roberts’ Jess focus on a local mosque that could hold the key to a major victory in the battle, things suddenly get personal and tragic.
Jess’ teenage daughter is brutally raped and murdered and left in a dumpster next to the mosque. The trio, with the Kidman portrayed Claire’s ambitious city attorney helping, track the perp all over Los Angeles — obsessively consumed with trying to catch him. As we see from the intertwining scenes from today, that effort failed and left all three scarred. Ray is no longer in law enforcement. He is a security expert for the New York Mets. Jess is still working the crime-filled streets of LA, albeit a shell of her former self.
The only one who seems to have risen above it all in some way is Claire, who is now L.A. Distract Attorney. When Ray returns to town convinced that he has found the killer after spending his nights for the last 13 years searching, the pain, heartache and anger all again rise to the top.
Director Billy Ray astounded us with his work on the Golden Globe winning Shattered Glass. Here he not only helms, but wrote the screenplay, based on the Oscar winning foreign film from Argentina. Unfortunately, much of the power of the original’s story is lost in translation as the director goes for an off-noir take on the tale that just doesn’t work here. There are plenty of examples of where noir works well in a city of sunshine like Los Angeles, but Ray doesn’t seem to grasp its most basic of concepts.
The film’s twists are solid, but don’t have the impact they should. That is probably because the build-up to these reveals are told without the emotional power they need to have the audience truly care about what the characters are going through. The risks and costs of what they’re trying to uncover and the thing that has obsessed them for over a decade is never fully embodied as it should be to warrant the jaw-dropping moment the storyteller was going for.
The stars do their best to save this film, but at a certain point you can feel Kidman and Roberts sort of check out, content to let the story unravel. Ejiofor stays more connected to the story than his colleagues, but it still an empty and hallow reveal, despite his best efforts to make it more than it is.
Secret in Their Eyes is truly a case of the whole trying to be greater than the sum of its parts. The thing is, an audience needs all those parts to be perfectly tuned for a crime noir film to work — especially one that plays loosely with the timeline while telling the story.
Perhaps it was too much to ask that a foreign film with an Academy Award for being the best of its lot be remade and possibly improved. Sure, movies are remade all the time in this day and age in Hollywood. But hopefully, Secret in Their Eyes could be a lesson in leaving certain films alone and letting them stand on their own — even if we have to watch them with subtitles.
Grade: C-