Amazon.com video review:
Taut, styish, and smart, Second Sight is the rare detective thriller with a brutal poetry in its premise. Detective Chief Inspector Ross Tanner
(Clive Owen) is a maverick cop and workaholic who solves crimes by putting
his faith in facts he can see for himself. What more cruel irony could
beset
him than a slow and irreversible loss of vision? While a rare disorder
attacks his cornea, causing intermittent blindness and hallucinations,
Tanner
conceals his problem in the pursuit of a murderer who brutally beat a
19-year-old man to death. The suspects are largely people the victim knew
well, including his mother (Phoebe Nicholls) and stepfather (Stuart
Wilson), the nanny (Louise Atkins) of his young sister, a gardener (Eddie
Marsan) who supplied him drugs, and an uncle (Stuart Wilson again, playing
twins) who has allegedly been out of the country for years but in fact has
been keeping a low profile in London. Tanner faces an added strain,
initially, when he is partnered with a female detective, Catherine Tully
(Claire Skinner), whose reliance on intuition is the antithesis of his own
methods. Nevertheless, the two make a bargain after Skinner deduces
Tanner's
medical troubles: she'll be his eyes if he promises to give her equal
credit
for apprehending the killer. Utterly engrossing, Second Sight is
part
of that tradition of somber crime thriller done so well on British
television, from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy to Prime
Suspect. Stars Claire Skinner (Sleepy
Hollow) and Clive Owen carry the load exceptionally well. Owen
(Closer, Bent), who looks like a slightly more rugged version
of Kevin Costner and is instantly likable onscreen, conveys Tanner's
necessary conversion to a more intuitive approach to police work with great
care. Owen has looked like a candidate for international stardom for a
while,
and Second Sight certainly reinforces that perception. --Tom
Keogh
