Saturday, September 1, 2007

Eyes of Laura Mars (1978, Irvin Kershner)

"Suddenly Laura Mars can see through the eyes of a serial killer as he commits his crimes. She contacts the police and with the aid of a police detective, tries to stop the killer. But first, they have to figure out who it is."

I don't know why but the cover of this film has always interested me for years. It just seemed like it might turn out to be some kind of hidden gem of a film. So, I finally decided to check it out and see what it might be like.

It's directed by the man who would go on to do Empire Strikes Back as his follow up film to this. It has a story and screenplay by John Carpenter. Plus, it has Tommy Lee Jones, Faye Dunaway, and Brad Dourif in the cast. This has all the ingredients for a great film that maybe time has forgotten about.

All these ingredients, though, only serve to make a very disappointing film.

The film starts off great,keeps on going great, becomes excellent, and then turns extremely bad and lame in the last minutes of a film.

Normally I would say "The whole film is great except for the last couple of minutes" but given that this is a thriller with a mystery as its main story point, the whole whole film relies on the final twist. This is the point of a mystery film, you just wait for the final pay off that simply just solves the mystery which will end the film. It really is that simple most of the time.

The problem with The Eyes of Laura Mars is that the twist is cringe worthy bad. It is horrible. It is lame. It makes the whole film seem stupid and pointless. It is simple horrible. So horrible that it ruins everything that the film had going for it, which was a lot. The leaps of logic it takes are amazing in their own awful way.

This is just a big disappointment of a film and even more so when you are almost done watching it and you are convinced that you are about to finish watching a great movie. I have never seen an ending affect a films overall quality so much.

- C

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