Fusing blaxploitation and
film noir but suffering from a weak storyline that makes the whole picture feel
enervated, Black Eye is a tolerable
mystery/thriller featuring a characteristically confident leading performance
by Fred Williamson. The movie isn’t a misfire, per se, and it’s got a fair
amount of sleaze, so there’s a certain lurid appeal. Nonetheless, nearly
everything about Black Eye is
second-rate. The characters are all overly familiar archetypes, the central
mystery feels murky and unimportant, and the general vibe is that of a
disposable TV episode. That said, Black
Eye runs a gamut of tonalities. At one extreme, a frothy romantic montage
features Williamson’s character and his girlfriend riding a bicycle built for
two. At the other extreme, Williamson visits the set of a porno movie to
question someone who has valuable information. Oh, and that aforementioned
girlfriend? She’s bisexual. So it’s not as if Black Eye is completely bereft of provocative elements.
The problem
is that the filmmakers never commit wholeheartedly to a particular style. The
movie is tame one minute, tough the next, and turgid all the way through. The
wheezy story begins with the death of an aging screen star in Los Angeles.
Someone steals the star’s distinctive walking stick from the star’s casket,
setting a Maltese Falcon-type mystery
in motion. Who stole the stick? Why is the stick so valuable? And what secrets
will the investigation uncover? Also thrown into the mix is a subplot about a
desperate father (Richard Anderson) employing Williamson’s character, Stone, to
find his missing daughter. And then there’s the whole business of Stone’s
relationship with Cynthia (Teresa Graves), who splits her time between romps
with Stone and trysts with female lovers. Cynthia’s sexual identity is a
source of much consternation for the decidedly heterosexual Stone.
Complaining
that the plot of Black Eye is hard to
follow is beside the point, since mystery narratives thrive on confusion and
obfuscation, but it’s hard to care much about what happens. Stone has very
little personal connection to the case, and the plot threads tethering the
missing girl to the walking stick are flimsy. Therefore, Black Eye unfolds as a series of somewhat disconnected scenes,
including a chase or two, some fistfights, the occasional sexual encounter, and
lots of drab vignettes in which Stone pumps people for uninteresting
information. Calling it anything more than passable would require exaggeration.
Black Eye:
FUNKY