BLINK. Directed by Michael Apted; written by Dana Stevens; produced by David Blocker for New Line Cinema. Starring Madeleine Stowe and Aidan Quinn. Rated R (language, nudity, some violence)
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At first glance, Blink has a quite familiar look—the old "lady-in-jeopardy, cop-falls-for-witness" story.
But we're in for some entertaining new twists here. Blink is a nifty murder mystery with all kinds of fascinating, inter-related sub-plots and a cast of characters that is pleasingly complex, one that puts some new spins on some old stereotypes.
Emma (Stowe) is blind at Blink's beginning. But she gets corneal transplants almost right away and spends the rest of the movie trying to adjust to vision after being deprived of it for 20 years. Her rehabilitation is severely complicated when she sees a murderer leaving the scene of his crime.
Sight doesn't return to Emma wholesale, but in wavering, hallucinatory images that neither she nor we are ever completely sure of. This uncertainty adds to the problems of the detective on the case, Hallstrom (Quinn), who also has difficulty balancing his attraction to Emma with the demands of his job.
With the help of a first-rate script, Stowe manages to transform the role of usually hapless victim into a strong, yet vulnerable (and quite appealing) heroine. She is naturally frightened by her predicament, but the courage she developed to deal with her disability doesn't desert her when she needs to face down a bad guy.
Quinn's character is a more familiar figure in these sorts of movies: a wise-cracking loner cop with a soft spot for long-legged damsels in distress. But he's appealing enough to make us root for him, and a good enough actor to give his character more depth than the usual precinct house allows.
It's good, too, that these interesting characters have an equally interesting story to act out. Nicely convoluted, with lots of clues scattered throughout that you don't recognize as clues until the end, it's a first-class mystery thriller.
The special effects used to capture Emma's half-visual capability are creepy enough to make Blink pretty scary. And it has a few scenes with a corpse and the eye surgery that are somewhat gruesome, although not overly so. These are the only warnings I'd tack onto an otherwise unreserved recommendation.
February 16, 1994