The Eye

An effective if redundant fright flick, Jessica Alba's new vehicle, The Eye, is the latest in an apparently unending assembly line of innovative Asian horror films turned into grist for the Hollywood mill.

The Eye is more interested in keeping us on our guard than in scaring us, and it does that pretty well.

Jessica Alba makes for a solid B-horror movie heroine in a role that plays to her strengths: good looks, a sweet personality and an undeniable vulnerability.

It was a lot more fun when Haley Joel Osment saw dead people.

Any film that blands up its material this severely, botches its central premise this thoroughly, and so completely fails to build tension can clearly own most of the blame.

It turns out that The Eye, this month's homely Hollywood remake of an Asian horror film, could credibly double as one of those feminine sixth-sense TV dramas.

Don't blink or you'll miss the bulk of the scary stuff on display in The Eye, the latest in a seemingly never-ending string of Hong Kong horror flicks remade for North American audiences.

The most vivid aspect of The Eye is its poster image, that of a huge female eye with a human hand gripping the lower lid from the inside. The least vivid aspect is the way Jessica Alba delivers a simple line of expository dialogue.

Strapping lads who flock to The Eye hoping to lay peepers upon a bikini-clad Jessica Alba are in for a cruel disappointment.

Someone else should have seen the obvious hurdle of making a horror movie that relies solely on Jessica Alba's acting abilities, which are akin to a janitor's skills at emptying garbage cans.

The Eye is good-looking (like the original) and not offensively dumb (like 80 per cent of the Asian horror remakes crowding screens over the last half-decade) but a lack of of crappiness doesn’t equal real quality.s

The Eye gives us little to think about, and even less to remember. After an hour or so, you're more than ready to go home.

Jessica Alba's new film The Eye is less a horror movie than it is a superhero origin story -- sort of Unbreakable by way of The Sixth Sense, but without a surprise ending (or really any surprises at all).

Therapy for this fright-free, superdull remake of a stylish Hong Kong horror flick is probably not covered by your HMO.

There’s probably an interesting concept for a psychological drama buried deep within The Eye, but as a psychological horror -- or, excuse me, “thriller” -- it’s empty.

The Eye has a few jumps, and it achieves a good percentage of the original film's creepy tone. But it concentrates too much on the real world and not enough on the supernatural.

If anyone could make a delusional cornea transplant patient unsympathetic, it's Alba, a vapid beauty with a singular gift for making bad acting look effortless.

A tediously noisesome English-language remake of an Asian horror picture that wasn't any great shakes to begin with, The Eye stars a rather drawn and undernourished-looking Alba.

It's hard to know who bears the brunt of the blame for The Eye's stunning dullness: Maybe star Jessica Alba, an actress of conspicuous limitations.

The film is scripted so mundanely that it ultimately would have been better off mimicking the storytelling approach (and runtime) of its dialogue-free, music video-ish teaser trailer.

For the love of Nobuo Nakagawa, knock it off already with the abysmal remakes of superior Asian horror films!