EYE FOR AN EYE: You Can’t Stop The Revenge Movie

The revenge movie is one of cinema’s fail-safe premises.  Whether you’re com­ing from the Hollywood side of film­mak­ing or the deep­est gut­ters of exploita­tion, the revenge movie punches the audience’s but­tons in a reli­able, effort­lessly effec­tive fash­ion.  As long as the basic rules of this arche­type are respected, the end results are guar­an­teed to draw a vis­ceral reac­tion from the viewer.

Eye For An Eye is an inter­est­ing upscale vari­ant on this form.  It wastes lit­tle time before going for the audience’s throat: moments after our mom/businesswoman hero Karen McCann (Sally Field) is intro­duced, her teenage daugh­ter is raped and killed by a face­less attacker.  To make it worse, this hap­pens while Karen on the phone with her, stuck in traf­fic.  As she makes a flus­tered bid to secure help and get home, she hears every last ugly sound of her daughter’s ordeal.

Karen is haunted by the tragedy as she tries to move on but things get worse when the killer, Robert Doob (an appro­pri­ately nasty Kiefer Sutherland), is found.  Nice-guy cop Denillo (Joe Mantegna) assures Karen that jus­tice will be done but thread­bare evi­dence and the mis­han­dling of a trial pro­ce­dure allow Robert to be set free.  Karen begins to pon­der the option of revenge, learn­ing self-defense skills and fol­low­ing Robert around.  Her dilemma becomes a dance of death when Robert quickly fig­ures out that he’s being tailed and begins plot­ting his own retaliation.

Eye For An Eye was sav­aged by crit­ics dur­ing its release in 1996: it had the mis­for­tune of open­ing around the same time as the respected death-penalty drama Dead Man Walking and many crit­ics found its tacit approval of vig­i­lan­tism tacky in the wake of the then-recent O.J. Simpson trial (acknowl­edged in the film by a glimpse of the trial on the t.v. screen).  In fair­ness, Eye For An Eye is flawed from this per­spec­tive: the vil­lain is por­trayed as an unre­deemable mon­ster, the moral­ity of revenge is never ques­tioned and the film ruth­lessly stacks the deck in favor of its hero­ine.  However, these cri­tiques miss the point of the film: it is not about dis­cussing issues.  It is about catharsis.

Regardless of what you think of its moral­ity, the film is helmed with skill and style.  The script was adapted from Erika Holzer’s novel by Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa, the same team who exploited parental fears with The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, and it hums along with clock­work pre­ci­sion.  Director John Schlesinger was on the down­ward swing of his career at this time but he turns in a pro­fes­sional per­for­mance behind the cam­era, man­ag­ing some nerve-wracking set­pieces along the way: the best might be a scene where Field chases after her younger daugh­ter in a crowd and imag­ines every strange man she bumps into as the guy who attacked her eldest daughter.

However, the fuel for the fire in Eye For An Eye is its per­for­mances.  The film wisely used its gen­er­ous bud­get to pull in an array of worth­while char­ac­ter actors: Ed Harris scores a few nice scenes as Karen’s sec­ond hus­band, Mantegna deliv­ers the appro­pri­ate mix­ture of grit and world-weariness as the cop on the case and Charlayne Woodard is impres­sive as a fel­low child-murder vic­tim who befriends Karen.  There are also effec­tive turns from Philip Baker Hall and Keith David as survivor-group par­tic­i­pants with their own sin­is­ter agenda (the film’s most inter­est­ing sub­plot).  Elsewhere, kung-fu flick fans will be amused by a cameo from fight­ing femme Cynthia Rothrock as a self-defense teacher.

As rock-solid as the sup­port­ing cast is, such praise would be imma­te­r­ial if the leads weren’t impres­sive.  Thankfully, Field and Sutherland nail their roles.  Field brings an emo­tional depth to Karen, draw­ing the viewer her con­flict­ing emo­tions as she moves toward revenge.  Her nat­ural like­abil­ity goes a long way towards bring­ing the audi­ence around to the character’s actions.  Sutherland is just as impres­sive, breath­ing fresh life into a paper-thin role via an impres­sive dis­play of neg­a­tive charisma.  He cre­ates the grown-up’s ver­sion of the Boogeyman — espe­cially dur­ing a great scene where he tracks Karen’s youngest daugh­ter at school — and revenge-flicks will love hat­ing him.

To sum up, Eye For An Eye is a big-budget exploita­tion flick that breezes past seri­ous issues to exploit its audience’s crav­ing for pri­mal jus­tice… and it works like a charm because every­one involved knew how to pull it off.  The revenge movie wins again.