Charlayne Woodard

(In French, On Cable TV, September 2022) Isn’t it fascinating how failed manipulation ends up creating hatred for the manipulator? I’m not giving psychological advice here—I’m talking about Eye for an Eye, a thoroughly detestable thriller from the depths of the mid-1990s. To its rare credit, it does announce its reprehensive colour early, as the opening moments race to its first manipulative set-piece—the murder of a young girl by a psychopath, heard by her mom on the phone as she’s stuck in a traffic jam. The histrionics coming out of Sally Field during that sequence, added to the naked manipulation required to get there in less than five minutes, are all the warnings you need to figure out that the entire film is going to be like that. Built on paranoid reactionary propaganda in order to create debilitating fear and retributive anger among the lowest common denominator, Eye for an Eye goes through the clichés at a blistering pace: The cute kid is killed, the hilariously over-the-top killer is caught, legal technicalities ensure that the killer is set free to kill again, and the mom decides to take justice into her own hands. And go it goes until the wearily predictable finale. There are no surprises here (although a subplot featuring Charlayne Woodard almost gets the film questioning its own assumptions, but not really), only disappointments and hollow attempts to make viewers blind with rage. No matter if the film piles on the absurdities: this is a film made for Fox News viewers, and the dumber Fox News viewer at that. Why did Field, Ed Harris and Kiefer Sutherland end up in this? Well, I suspect that Sutherland at least had some fun playing the single worst imaginable antagonist with a great deal of over-the-top gusto. Director John Schlesinger directs this vigilante fantasy with the slickness of 1990s thrillers, but none of the qualities—Eye for an Eye remains a deeply unpleasant film: cheap, trite, ugly… and manipulative.