Secret In Their Eyes, film review: Crudely mechanical remake is an utter travesty

(15) Billy Ray, 111 mins. Starring: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts, Dean Norris, Alfred Molina

Private investigations: Nicole Kidman and Chiwetel Ejiofor in ‘Secret in Their Eyes’ (Karen Ballard/STX Productions)

This isn't so much a remake of Juan José Campanella's 2009 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film as an utter travesty of it. Campanella's eerie film was partly an allegory about political corruption in 1970s Argentina. It featured a wonderful, very soulful performance from Ricardo Darin as the hero tormented by the memory of a murder that took place years in the past. The remake is a crudely mechanical crime thriller with a very clumsy flashback structure.

Chiwetel Ejiofor plays LA-based FBI investigator Ray Kasten. In 2002, when the US was reeling in the aftermath of 9/11, the daughter of one of his colleagues was murdered. Years later, the crime continues to obsess Kasten. Present-day scenes and prolonged flashbacks to 2002 are cut together crudely. It doesn't help that the main actors, Ejiofor, Nicole Kidman as his boss and Julia Roberts as his closet colleague, look the same in the older scenes as they do in the contemporary ones.

Ejiofor does his best as the tormented agent who lets the lines between his private life and career become blurred. One of the drawbacks is that he doesn't seem particularly competent at his job. (He is always allowing his quarry to wriggle free.) Another is a storyline that is far too full of tricks and red herrings to have any emotional resonance.