Sight

Directed by Andrew Hyatt, Sight tells the true-life story of a Chinese eye surgeon (Terry Chen’s Ming Wang) and his efforts at restoring the sight of a blind orphan. It’s almost inherently compelling subject matter that’s squandered by Hyatt right from the get-go, as the filmmaker, armed with a script written alongside John Duigan and Buzz McLaughlin, delivers a low-rent and terminally uninvolving endeavor that contains few, if any, wholeheartedly compelling attributes – with the movie’s arms-length feel compounded by a pervasively amateurish atmosphere reflected in its laughable dialogue, flat visuals, and unreasonably heavy-handed execution. Far more problematic, however, is Sight‘s ongoing emphasis on flashbacks into Wang’s adolescence and early adulthood, as such scenes possess a palpable pointlessness that slowly-but-surely transforms the proceedings into about as interminable a cinematic experience as one can easily recall. (There is, for example, an egregiously silly trying-on-clothes montage that effectively exemplifies the picture’s wrongheaded sensibilities.) By the time the thoroughly anticlimactic finish rolls around, Sight has cemented its place as a missed opportunity of rather epic proportions (ie Wang seems like an intriguing figure but the movie around him is just so relentlessly lackluster.)

no stars out of ****