Secret In Their Eyes 

 Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts, Dean Norris, Michael Kelly, Joe Cole, Zoe Graham, Alfred Molina

 Director: Billy Ray

 1hr 51min

The perils of doing an English-language remake of a film which was an enormous critical success in its original language are much more evident than usual in “Secret in Their Eyes.” Juan Jose Campanella’s Argentine-Spanish original of 2009 won an Oscar as best foreign film, but Billy Ray’s rehash of it won’t trouble the Academy nor any other of the umpteen film award panels. This has been transformed from what was a haunting tale of a country struggling to come to terms with its dark past, into a boringly predictable and conventional FBI-investigation thriller. Campanella’s original film dealt with a pair of investigators who were reunited many years later in order to re-open a case in which a young woman was brutally murdered. They had identified the killer, but he was part of the repressive government that ruled Argentina in the late 1970s, and therefore untouchable. The duo gradually unravelled the truth of the matter, which involved the husband of the murder victim.

Now to the rehash. Here, writer-director Ray has hit a real struggle as he attempts to come up with a plausible U.S.-set scenario which might marginally approximate the Argentinian one. In this, his version, the murdered woman is Carolyn (Zoe Graham), the much loved young daughter of L.A. detective Jess Cobb (Julia Roberts). Her death, occurring in the aftermath of 9/11, sends Jess’ colleague Ray Kasten (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who is rarely off-screen throughout the entire film, an FBI man assigned to the office of Los Angeles District Attorney Martin Morales (Alfred Molina), on a desperate mission to track down the perpetrator. Assisted by his sidekick Bumpy Willis (Dean Norris) and newly-appointed Assistant D.A. Claire Sloan (Nicole Kidman), Kasten locates the killer—a vacuous young guy named Marzin (Joe Cole). The tale’s twist this time is that Marzin is a snitch who is gathering confidential information for another L.A. detective, Reg Siefert (Michael Kelly). His ongoing task is in reporting on the interior workings of a local mosque, and as Morales steadfastly refuses to prosecute such an important source, the man strolls off as free as a bird. Following over thirteen years of searching, Kasten has now identified him as an ex-con named Beckwith (also played by Cole), and again enlists Bumpy - and Claire who by now is the full-tilt D.A., to collar him and finally bring an end to Jess’ grief.

Replacing Argentina’s “dirty war,” in which thousands of people conveniently ‘disappeared’ courtesy of a military junta with tiresome American xenophobia, is both puerile and tasteless. Additionally, Ray’s decision to abandon the central core from the original film of a grieving husband unconnected to the investigators, with a colleague tormented by the death of a daughter further cheapens the whole scenario. Ejiofor brings a load of intensity and charisma to his key role of Kasten, with the guy determined to right a wrong from long ago. Kidman is stunningly elegant and in fine form as Claire but she does look oddly identical in the chronologically later scenes as she does in the supposedly earlier ones. Roberts, by contrast, abandons every vestige of glamour as a woman robbed of her reason for living. She actually does some top notch acting work as the stricken Jess, but really her effort is more than the sub-standard material deserves. Top marks in the secondary cast go to Cole, who not only differentiates nicely between the aspects of his double role but manages a real sense of menace. “Secret in Their Eyes” (they’ve dropped the definite article from the title in this remake) is, however, drearily drab and clearly lacking the powerful subtext of the original.