The premise of the film - a victim's family-member takes revenge - has been done and done better: think Charles Bronson. What makes this film different is that we have a woman in the Bronson role. Not merely a woman but the pixie-like Sally Field. She goers from pixie to prize-fighter in no time, from never having held a gun to scoring high in her test-shoot in no time as well. Ed Harris truly did phone in his role as her husband. Keifer Sutherland, however, is quite good as the perpetrator / rapist / killer; there is something all too real in the way his lip curls into a snarl. The last 15 minutes of the film are positively awful; as though its intent was to fool the viewer. A waste.

Great cast! Sally Field, Kiefer Sutherland, Ed Harris, Joe Montegna. All wasted on a script that can be found any evening on Lifetime Movie Network, or done better somewhere in the archives of "Law&Order." It's a terrible piece of commercial stuff. The opening scene shows us one of those extraordinarily happy families going about their breakfasts and anticipating a party later that day in their sunny California home. Harris and Field have two lovely daughters, one about five and the other seventeen. They laugh and kiss one another. A tour down Memory Lane that takes us to place like "Father Knows Best." The older daughter is at home alone in mid morning, chatting with Field, who is on her way to work and is stuck in a traffic jam. Suddenly, Field hears crashing and screaming at the other end. She leaps out of her car in this highway parking lot, begins screaming gibberish, and runs between the lines of cars, waving her hands and begging somebody to call the police. She remains hysterical for what seemed like a very long time. Eons came and went while she rushed headlong down the street, knocking uncaringly into pedestrians.It's easy to skip most of the plot because it's been seen before in one or another of its isomorphs. The daughter is raped and murdered brutally. The funeral follows. Field is inconsolable; she wants the murderer caught and constantly hectors the cops. Well, he IS promptly caught by the detectives, led by Joe Montegna., Alas, the culprit, Sutherland, is gotten off by a small legal point and is free to walk the Los Angeles streets. A determined Field begins to follow him around.You ought to see Sutherland and his milieu. He himself, the first good look we get at him, is a serviceable villain, pure e-vil. He smokes. He pours ice water on a friendly dog. His hair is long and greasy. He wears tight T shirts, long black trousers, and swings a foot-long silver key chain as he walks through the seedy Latino district, sneering arrogantly at everything around him. He lives in an apartment above a pool hall. The air is filled with vicious curses, raucous music, and the odor of things frying in lard. The inside of his apartment is appalling -- unmade bed, dirty dishes, empty wine bottles, girlie magazines scattered around the floor, a general sense of clutter almost the equal of my own digs. Disgusting.Field acquires a .38 and trains herself in martial arts. Then, for a while, the movie slides into the empowerment of women. When a man in dark clothing follows her into one of those empty underground garages with eerie lighting along the walls, she ambushes him and kicks him roundly in the family jewels. But the poor cripple was just an ordinary fellow trying to get to his car. Big joke. When she has sex with Harris, she gets on top. She also has a loud argument with Montegna which ends with her climactic curse: "F*** YOU!" and she storms out to great applause.Sutherland is aware of these goings on and taunts her by making friends with Field's sole remaining daughter at the playground. Sutherland also pillages another house and rapes and murders a delicious Latina. But again there's nothing the cops can do because it's all "circumstantial" as Montegna puts it.It's not so circumstantial at the end, when Field lures him into her home and then perforates him with half a dozen .38 slugs. Montegna, with a smile, takes her away from the milling crowd of police officers and tells her he's been at this a long time and he knows what she did. But they're both satisfied. She's only human, after all, with human reflexes. If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? The person I felt sorriest for was poor Ed Harris. He's stuck in the hapless role of the father, trying to finish his own grief work, the good-natured, caring guy, who just isn't THERE for her.I never did understand how Field did anything illegal at the climax. Montegna says he knows what she did, okay, but what did she DO that was against the law? She ransacked Sutherland's dumpy apartment and left her hat behind, so he would know who was responsible. But she didn't leave him a note saying that she had the hots for him and wanted him to come to her nicely furnished home, strap a red rubber ball in her mouth, and ravish her brutally before killing her. It sounds as if Field has outwitted the law and gotten away with something -- but what, other than trespass? But that's just one of several unexplained properties of the film. I mean, a member of Fields' share-the-grief support group reveals herself as an FBI agent doing undercover work, looking for vigilantes. Really? My HARD-EARNED-TAX-DOLLARS are paying this babe to sit around and listen to crime victims tell their sad tales? Why aren't the FBI out looking for the malefactor who stole my 24-inch bicycle when I was twelve years old, hey? It also turns out that the FBI agent, who is a black woman, is in a lesbian marriage. None of this has anything to do with the story except to demonstrate how tolerant Field is. Recently, it's become chic for a heroine to have a gay friend in the movies. Oh, also, the little daughter is named Megan. I don't want to see any more women named Megan. And let us knock off naming girls "Dakota" while we're at it. A Dakota is one of two states, both of them alive with plump Phrynosoma douglassi.Basta! There's a fine "Law&Order" episode that isn't insulting. See if you can find it.

You know, as a law school student just about to become a lawyer, I'm much aware of the problems that making justice by yourself can cause to a whole society. That being said, I imagined this movie would try to justify the unjustifiable, but it surprisingly goes in a different direction. The victim's mother becomes obsessive after her daughter gets murdered, but the film never wants to show that she could just murder the bad guy and get easily away with murder. That proves this movie isn't cheesy or formulaic, as I was expecting. The family portrayed in here is very believable and likable, thanks to a great performance made by the three of them-- with highlights to Sally Field, who had an unintentionally funny scene when she swears at the sheriff. Also, directing is professional, doing just like many suspenseful thrillers from the nineties have done. The plot is coherent and well developed, allowing the spectator to understand why the characters were doing what they did, leaving almost no space for doubts. Kiefer Sutherland surely had no hard time on portraying such character, given he did a lot of psychos in the past. All in all, "Eye for an Eye" proves to be a mature film that many of you might enjoy. Recommended.

Sally Fields does a good job with this movie as a revenge seeking mother of a teenage daughter who's been raped and murdered. I suppose to make this worth watching, she has to do a good job with this. The story itself has been done over and over: seeking revenge after a violent crime because the justice system has failed. That's a pretty cliché type of situation and story, so there's not really a great deal to recommend this as far as originality is concerned. But Fields is good, and Kiefer Sutherland is appropriately creepy and threatening as the rapist/murderer. The portrayal of the rape of Karen's daughter was terrifying, but (thankfully) not especially graphic.) The same could be said for the later rape committed by Sutherland's Doob. The movie, in my opinion, also makes a fair point about the justice system leaning too far on the side of defending the rights of obviously guilty criminals at the expense of actually dispensing justice for their victims. I understand the need to protect the rights of the accused, but there does have to be a balance, and that balance is sometimes lost in the system that we have.I was kind of put off by the "group" the McCann's attended for people who had lost loved ones to violence. To each his or her own, I suppose, but I can't imagine that sitting around night after night talking about the same thing over and over and over again is really going to help anyone move on, and I wasn't convinced by the "vigilante organization" aspect of this.I have to say, though, that I did like the ending. What I was finding distasteful up to this point was that Karen was going to turn vigilante, and by so doing she'd be be risking losing her other daughter as well by ending up in prison, which might have satisfied her own desire for revenge but would have been very selfish toward the younger daughter. So, the way she played things, she made sure that (a) she'd get her revenge, but (b) that she wouldn't lose anything more by doing it. So, the ending worked for me. Overall, I found this a pretty good watch. (7/10)