Secret In Their Eyes Trailer: An Unnecessary Remake Made Necessary

Juan Jose Campanella’s The Secret In Their Eyes won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2010. That should have been a good enough sign that it didn’t need to be remade for American audiences. But, whatever, we can’t make all the moviegoers read, right? So, Hollywood went and produced an English-language version of the Argentine drama. They could have also just made it a cheap, dumb effort for those subtitle-hating jerks. Cast Kevin James, Ashley Judd and Katherine Heigl in it.

Instead, as you can see in the above trailer, they’ve attempted to make another good movie out of the material. They cast Oscar nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor, Oscar winner Julia Roberts and Oscar winner Nicole Kidman. They got Oscar-nominated screenwriter Billy Ray (Captain Phillips) to adapt the original and direct the remake. They even removed the word “the” from the beginning of the title, because we all know the shorter the title the better the movie. Maybe that’s not true, but it does make it look streamlined.

Also on board are a couple representatives of favorite TV series, Breaking Bad‘s Dean Norris and Michael Kelly of House of Cards. But Roberts is the one to watch for, it seems. She’s doing the thing where she goes all non-glam for the role of an FBI agent whose daughter is murdered, and it’s almost enough for her to be unrecognizable (at least as herself, as opposed to, say, Melissa Leo). I wouldn’t want to jump the gun with just a trailer or anything, but maybe Secret In Their Eyes will be up for at least one Oscar, too.

The original version received some backlash when it won the Academy Award over such contenders as The White Ribbon and A Prophet, but it shouldn’t be dismissed, especially now that its replacement is coming. Check out Rob Hunter’s review for FSR, in which he grades the film an ‘A-,’ if you really need convincing.

Then see the remake when it opens on October 23rd.

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