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‘Secret in Their Eyes’ remakes a pedestrian thriller into something even less interesting

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Without strong, believable characters, Secret in Their Eyes is just a generic thriller.

Two and a half stars

Secret in Their Eyes Chiwetel Ejiofor, Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman. Directed by Billy Ray. Rated PG-13. Opens Friday.

The Argentine film The Secret in Their Eyes was a safe, predictable pick for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2010: a handsomely mounted, fairly conventional murder mystery from a filmmaker (Juan José Campanella) with experience directing episodes of American TV shows. The new American remake (which omits the definitive article at the beginning of the title) is even more conventional, by necessity dropping the original movie’s connection to a tumultuous period in Argentine history. Writer-director Billy Ray substitutes in post-9/11 paranoia (the movie is set partially in 2002, and partially in the present), but it comes off as window dressing for a rote crime thriller with some excessive star power.

Those stars are mostly miscast, though, which drains the romantic tension from the central relationship between former FBI agent Ray Kasten (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and prosecutor Claire Sloan (Nicole Kidman). The largely unrequited love affair was one of the strongest elements of the original movie, but Ejiofor and Kidman have no chemistry whatsoever, and no matter how many times they blandly state their feelings for each other, it’s never convincing. They begin working together in 2002 when Ray is assigned to a counter-terrorism unit in LA, and he discovers the murdered daughter of his colleague Jessica Cobb (Julia Roberts).

In 2002, Ray, Claire and Jessica go outside official channels to track the murderer of Jessica’s daughter, while in 2015, Ray returns after years working in the private sector, certain he’s uncovered new details in the case. The existence of the present-day scenes takes much of the suspense out of the flashbacks, although director Ray does create a few exciting moments, most notably in a sequence set in a sports stadium that was a standout in the original. But even though the filmmaker changes numerous elements of the story, he retains the absurd climactic twists, which render the preceding action somewhat inconsequential.

Ejiofor projects determination as a man obsessed with solving a long-forgotten case, but he can’t make the relationship between Ray and Claire work. Kidman and Roberts, however, are both completely wrong for their roles as, respectively, an ambitious yet empathetic lawyer and a traumatized mother seeking vengeance. Without strong, believable characters, Secret in Their Eyes is just a generic thriller, the kind of movie that won’t even be remembered—let alone win an award—come Oscar time.

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