Regret, frustration and sorrow. These uplifting emotions take shift duty all over Chiwetel Ejiofor’s face as he delivers a marvellous performance in what is unfortunately a lacklustre film. Based on Argentinian director Juan José Campanella’s Oscar-winning foreign language picture from 2009, Billy Ray’s adaptation of Secret in Their Eyes can be intellectually engaging, but the action is far too sluggish when the action shifts to a standard drama. In the darkened theatre auditorium, the secret in your eyes may be that before the third act’s revelations you have closed them out of boredom.
Our story begins in the present day, when frazzled former FBI agent Ray (Ejiofor) shambles into his old office to speak with Claire (Nicole Kidman) about an old case. Claire was once a colleague, but is now the big cheese, and seems slightly annoyed that Ray is back. Just in time for Ray to announce the purpose of his visit, in walks another agent, Jess (Julia Roberts), who, like Ray, looks like she hasn’t slept in a month.
Through flashback, we learn what’s been eating at this trio for the last 13 years. As a hastily put together counterintelligence crew surveilling a suspicious mosque a few months after 9/11, Ray, Jess and Bumpy (Dean Norris) get a call about the body of a dead teen girl in a dumpster near their target location. It turns out the deceased is Jess’s daughter, and the tragedy consumes Ray as he tries to find the killer. All these years later, Ray arrives with a folder and a picture and says: “It’s him, and this time he won’t get away.”
But before the movie starts toggling between the two timelines for its quite standard Law and Order-esque police work, there’s something else. An unusual amount of time is dedicated to Ray and Claire’s first meeting, some flirting as they get their ID photos taken. After a while we realise that Billy Ray (screenwriter of Captain Phillips and The Hunger Games, director of Shattered Glass) intends for the missed-connection storyline between Ray and Claire to have as much gravitas as the more typical perp-who-walked tragedy.
Regrettably, the far more interesting story about the fumbled love affair is shoved aside for scenes of standard cop movie cliche. (Not even Alfred Molina can bark “not your jurisdiction!” and make it sound fresh.) The film continually promises to offer insight into complex themes, like the rush to increase surveillance after 9/11, but instead we get another scene of a suspect being interrogated. All hope of taking this picture seriously is lost when Ray and Claire get in an elevator on one floor, their released collar (Joe Cole) steps in to glare at them just before the doors close and, a moment later, the grieving mother Jess gets on, too. Maybe this image of our full cast “all going down together” is intended to work as surrealist metaphor, but nothing else in the movie is this ludicrous, so it doesn’t fit. (Well, nothing until the ending, but I’m not getting into that here.)
Joe Cole’s villain, Marzin, may be a vile rapist and murderer, but he’s also protected by elements deep within the force; untouchable as long as he continues as a snitch inside the mosque. Ray’s detective work within and without his department just isn’t all that interesting, and Billy Ray’s straight-shooting style doesn’t do much to enhance the material. The original Spanish-language version got good notices for a technically dazzling sequence at a crowded soccer stadium, an all-in-one-take chase that would make Brian De Palma weep. The scene is imported to Los Angeles’ Dodger Stadium, but film students can put away their notebooks. It’s cut together like any other chase, in a completely unremarkable fashion.
Chiwetel Ejiofor, one of our top-tier film actors right now, is on good form throughout, and the others act their hearts out, too. But they are somewhat left out to dry in a production that feels more like syndicated television than a feature film. The events of Secret in Their Eyes may have consumed these characters for 13 years, but you’re likely to forget this movie after 45 minutes.
