While I didn't enjoy this film, that doesn't mean you won't. No matter what I say, the people involved in this project did it: they actually made a movie. That's something to be applauded. With that established...
Formulaic, contrived, dull and confusing, Eye See You (released as D-Tox outside North America) stinks of re-writes and re-shoots. Shelved for 3 years as it underwent endless changes to try and give it some kind of market value, I bet most people havenât even heard of it despite a cast that includes Sylvester Stallone, Kris Kristofferson, Robert Patrick and Dina Meyer!
FBI agent Jake Malloy (Stallone) is pursuing a serial killer with a grudge against cops. When he stops them at great personal cost, Malloy falls into a deep depression and attempts suicide. Sent to a rehabilitation program designed for law enforcement officers by his best friend, Agent Chuck Hendricks (Charles S. Dutton), several bodies suddenly turn up. It appears the killer may have survived.
The first problem are the characters, which are so flat, unmemorable and so hurriedly introduced you cannot keep track of whoâs who. I couldâve predicted the identity of the killer easy if I werenât scrambling to figure out which staff members of the facility are still alive and which arenât, or if that dead body was the bald dude with no lines, the depressed junior officer who just told us his tragic backstory in detail, or that guy played by Mif (is that right?). Even by eliminating the characters who are so obviously set up as antagonists they canât possibly be villainous for real, there are so many people waiting to get butchered you canât pinpoint how the ending will go. I donât mean that in a good way.
Eye See You is one of THOSE serial killer films, the kind with a gimmicky murderer who is so intelligent and meticulous in his planning he must be a mind reader, or the luckiest person on Earth. For a large chunk of the film, director Jim Gillespie wants us to think the killer is dead when in fact, heâs followed Malloy to the rehab center to torment him some more. How did the killer know Malloy was going there? Was he always planning on eliminating one inmate after another, or is it just happy coincidence that a freak storm breaks out, cutting all communication to the outside world and trapping everyone indoors?
Even before then, things donât add up. The killerâs gimmick is that he likes to drill through peopleâs eyes, usually when theyâre looking through the peephole of their front door. He strikes with (apparently) the same weapon as the âDriller Killerâ because it cuts through everything like it was butter and so quickly his victim canât pull their faces away. How he knows, theyâre looking through the peephole when heâs pressing his tool against it, I donât know. So yes, heâs needlessly cruel. I mean following that up with calls telling Malloy âI see youâ and leaving the same message under the corpses eyelids? It means he's killing people for the puns. Talk about inhumane. Then he follows it up by hanging his victims â apparently the manâs the fastest knot-tier in history.
During the last few minutes, Eye See You tumbles headlong down the stairwell of stupidity, transforming into an incoherent mess of an action scene whose conclusion is magnificent. I canât believe I havenât seen it done elsewhere. Itâs the kind of braindead, ultra-macho kick in the pants youâd expect at the end of those violent and nudity-filled low-budget drunken action flicks as the electric guitar solo ends. I laughed loud and hard, which was certainly not the intended reaction.
You wonât see the ending of Eye See You coming, but only because it sets up the characters so badly and because you won't know just how dumb this film is until the conclusion. (On VHS, March 26, 2018)
