Bring Your Slippers

If Angel Eyes had been produced for the Lifetime cable channel, the sound of lids cathartically pulled off pints of Haagen-Dazs across the nation would be deafening. Viewers would dress in pink bunny slippers and flannel jammies, and they would phone their best friends to commiserate about the characters during the broadcast. It's just that kind of movie, perfect for a certain mood, for guilt-free wallowing in a star-crossed tale of romance.

Alas, one must wallow in a public theatre to see Angel Eyes, on a big screen that magnifies its excesses and small breakdowns in logic. Still, there is a lot to like. Jennifer Lopez, the overexposed Queen of All Media, reminds us just how exceptional an actress she is by playing Sharon, a Chicago cop with a chip on her shoulder and tendencies toward isolation and dubious police methods.

While she can be a badass, Sharon is also compassionate toward the innocent. In the film's opening scene, we see her comfort an off-screen victim of a car accident, imploring him or her to stay alive. (The scene is shot from the victim's fading point-of-view.)

Cut to a year later, and we begin to understand Sharon's hostility and loneliness and the reasons she hides behind her badge to confront a violent family background. But there's another face in this story: Catch (Jim Caviezel), a haunted shell of a man shuffling through the back alleys of the Windy City. He looks and acts like a seared prophet, but he can smile and converse and is quick to help others in need.

On a fateful day, Catch helps Sharon by jumping a gunman poised to take her life. A relationship is born between these two emotional exiles that becomes alternately funny, prickly, sexy, and deeply trusting. Sharon finds a pair of arms in which she doesn't have to be strong all the time, and Catch begins filling in some of the blanks in his existence.

It's cozy enough, but there's one, uh, catch in this mutually beneficial affair: Catch refuses to divulge his real name or information about his past, little things that a girl wants to know about her boyfriend. Small details scattered about Gerald DiPego's screenplay hint at a connection between Catch and that car wreck in the first scene, but what that connection is, exactly, takes a while to disclose.

I don't want to tell you what's really going on here, but I promise that it's not a gimmick and that it has nothing to do with the supernatural. The film is ultimately more adult than one might expect, but there are too many lengthy and redundant scenes of therapeutic disclosure, too many key passages of dialogue more ornamentally sentimental than clear. There are also too many lapses in reasoning and continuity. (After a spell of letting her weep on his shoulder, Catch later asks Sharon why she can't let herself cry. Pay attention, dude.)

On the plus side, director Luis Mandoki (Message In a Bottle) handles his starmaking duties with an excellent sense of balance. There may be a few too many unnecessary close-ups of Lopez, but nothing as frivolous or obnoxious as the force-feeding of Julia Roberts to audiences during her Sleeping With the Enemy period. He also enlivens the make-up and break-up monotony by encouraging the chemistry between Lopez and Caviezel, who are wonderful at capturing a rare sort of instant intimacy between certain people, a bond that exists even before conventional bonding has begun.

So don't be afraid to have a good wallow if the mood strikes. But keep your bunny slippers off that gross, multiplex floor.