Deafly Boring
Reporter Mickey O'Malley (John C. McGinley) is on to Lt. Brock (Martin Sheen) as a kid he forced steal an extremely rare coin from a museum has met with Mickey and not only handed over the coin but told him everything. But whilst visiting his deaf personal trainer Jillian Shanahan (Marlee Matlin), Mikey sees Brock and his friends coming after him so hides the coin in Jillian's pager. But before he can retrieve it he ends up dead and Jillian now finds herself being stalked and harassed by Lt. Brock who is looking for the coin and so she ends up turning to Mickey's friend Ben Kendall (D.B. Sweeney) for help.
How to make the audience aware that a character cannot hear can be done in a variety of ways and for a split second "Hear No Evil" does it right as it shows the character of Jillian in a noisy park but when we see it from her perspective it is silent. Unfortunately not only do they feel it necessary to reiterate this again and again but then they have to toss in a scene of a handsome young man acting insensitively moronic when he realises she is deaf. It makes "Hear No Evil" frustrating before it even starts because the skill of story telling is clearly not there.
The lack of subtlety when it comes to the characters is again reiterated through being informed right away that Lt. Brock is a nasty piece of work and behind everything. How nasty? Well we quickly learn he is prone to violence to get what he wants. This lack of subtlety genuinely saps much of what could be decent out of the movie. And to add what saps stuff out of the movie we also have the coincidences such as Ben showing up at Jillian's house to be the knight in shining armour when she is being attacked.
The thing is that after sapping all the intrigue out of the movie all we get left is to watch Brock terrorize Jillian whilst she becomes close to Ben who helps to save her. Oh there is one other thing and we have the attractive pairing of Marlee Matlin and D.B. Sweeney together but both of them are wasted in this. And then there is Martin Sheen who seems to have been asked to over act as Lt. Brock which makes it all seem all the more forced.
What this all boils down to is that "Hear No Evil" ends up almost a waste of time because rather than going for subtly and allowing the audience to work things out for its own it tells you everything. The knock on effect is that "Hear No Evil" becomes little more than a visual movie with the looks of Marlee Matlin and D.B. Sweeney playing a bigger part than they needed to be.
