Someone had the brilliant idea of remaking an Oscar winner foreign film, El Secreto De Sus Ojos (The Secret In Their Eyes), as an American crime drama. Bad idea. This version, with Julia, Chiti and Nic, just isn’t very good.
Secret In Their Eyes (Chiwetel Ejiofor, Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts, Alfred Molina, Michael Kelly) – With most of the reviews of this American remake of the 2010 Best Foreign Language Film from Argentina being neutral to negative, I really wanted to like this star-laden flick. Alas, I did not. Director/writer Billy Ray assembled two Oscar winners, Julia Roberts and Nicole Kidman, and Oscar-nominated Chiti Ejiofor in a crime drama with all of the elements to be a great film. Darn!
Ejiofor plays Ray, an FBI agent who returns back to the city where the murder case he never resolved was committed. There, he is reunited with two female ex-co-workers, one of whom, Jess, was his good friend (Roberts) and the other, Claire (Kidman) the lawyer he always wanted. Roberts is now the city’s lead investigator and Kidman has risen to District Attorney. He is haunted by the case that occurred 13 years earlier in part because the victim was Jess’ daughter. The murder was brutal, and Ray believes that it could have been averted if only he had met with the daughter as scheduled to help plan Jess’s birthday party just hours before her body was found. He is sure he has located the killer after all of these years.
The film alternates between two periods: the time around the murder and the reunion 13 years later. The movement of time is less than seamless, forcing us to work a bit harder than we should. Ejiofor gets a bit of gray in his hair; Roberts looks more drawn; and Kidman changes hairstyles, but that is about it. They just don’t age enough, but that just begins to describe the problems with the movie.
The tension that the film requires is largely manufactured by that tense music these crime dramas always use. The search for the killer results in a chase scene and a confrontation that is anything but riveting. And when the inevitable twist of the plot occurs, it feels contrived and manipulative. Finally, the chemistry between Ray and Claire is about as hot as an Iowa winter.
Billy Ray is a far more seasoned writer (Captain Phillips, The Hunger Games, State of Play, Flightplan) than director (Shattered Glass, Breach), and it shows here. This is likely to be one of the few box office and critical failures for all of these actors. If you plan to spend a couple hours watching Secret In Their Eyes, you would be better off renting or streaming the Spanish version (The Secret In Their Eyes), which has a slightly different plot line but is a superior film.