Eye for an Eye (1996)

Directed by John Schlesinger. Starring Sally Field, Ed Harris, Kiefer Sutherland, Joe Mantegna, Charlayne Woodard, Beverly D’Angelo, Philip Baker Hall, Keith David, Alexandra Kyle, Darrell Larson, Donal Logue. [R]

Another exploitative vigilante drama lacking the courage of its convictions. The teenage daughter of an upper-middle class woman (Field) is raped and murdered, but the “system” fails her when it lets the perpetrator (Sutherland) get off on a procedural technicality; seeking help from a support group, she can’t find peace and is persuaded to take matters into her own hands by learning self-defense, getting a firearm, and even following the killer—not for nothing, her character is named “Karen.” Pretends to be high-minded about grief, justice, vigilantism, etc., but the script is completely phony about its issues, raising them in a calculated fashion and then declining to confront them. Field is meant to seem conflicted, but there’s never any doubt about what she’s going to do and how she’ll “get away with it”; her antagonist, meanwhile, is spared even a drop of complexity in making him the most loathsome creep imaginable (he even pours hot coffee onto a dog before kicking it). Manipulative dreck that panders at every opportunity, emerging on the other side as a mean-spirited revenge fantasy for people who don’t need much convincing. Adapted from a book by Erika Holzer.

19/100