This is an extraordinarily narcissistic high-concept vanity project for producer-star Tom Cruise, who as ever keeps getting his shirt off so that we can cop an eyeful of his super trim bod, though without showing us the thousand daily ab crunches needed to keep it that way. The big deal is that Tom's gorgeous chops are ruined in a car wreck, so he's sobbing in front of the bathroom mirror and gazing in horror at his (not that yucky) scars and deformities. But then a mysterious cosmetic surgeon perfectly restores his good looks, and Cruise finds love with a beautiful Spanish dancer called Sofia, played by Penelope Cruz.
Everything is, however, destroyed by a murder, terrifying hallucinations, and a Chinese box of puzzles and conspiracies buried deep in Cruise's mind. How deep is that exactly? The answer lies in Abre los Ojos, or Open Your Eyes, directed by Alejandro Amenabar, the 1997 Spanish movie of which this is a very close remake, and which had Penelope Cruz in the same role. Amenabar and his co-writer, Mateo Gil, are credited, but this movie loftily announces that it is "written for the screen and directed by Cameron Crowe" as if Open Your Eyes were some impossibly obscure European source material like a novel or a cave painting or something.
This is a cumbersome and bombastic film, lumbered with pseudo-futuristic ideas. Maybe Cruise got a taste for these from working with Kubrick. As for Abre los Ojos, it may, like George Sluizer's The Vanishing, go down in history as a neat arthouse thriller ruined by its Hollywood remake. Actually, Abre los Ojos doesn't completely work either, but it is certainly more distinctive than Cruise's mega-version. Perhaps Cruise will find a new medium for his scarred, disfigured hero, tormenting himself with tragic loss of pulchritude, emoting away like the Phantom of the Opera. Is Andrew Lloyd Webber looking for something to replace Cats?