Eye of the Beholder

(Columbia TriStar)

Ewan McGregor, looking as if he'd spent a long time in a room smoking cigarettes, is surveillance agent code-named the Eye, who keeps reminding us that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." In this Stephan Elliott adaptation of the Marc Behm novel, the Eye chases vampy serial killer Joanna Eris (Ashley Judd, minus whatever it is that made Double Jeopardy an unlikely hit) from Washington, DC, to Butthole, Alaska, in a ludicrously stylized and clumsily incoherent psychological thriller. Some effort is made to fill in the Eye's background -- his wife and child left him for some reason -- but that's just an excuse for Elliott to indulge in the fancy but tedious computer effects that should have been history when movies like The Net bombed big-time. As for Joanna, she's just a lost little girl whose daddy abandoned her at Christmas. More a self-indulgence than an exploration of voyeurism or obsession, this should all be gone in the blink of an eye.