Hear No Evil

Dir: Robert Greenwald

1993

*

You can file Robert Greenwald's 1993 thriller Hear No Evil under either 'Predictable', 'Insulting' or 'Stupid' but you'd be better off throwing it in the bin. Its premise is as formulaic as it gets, it's been done before and it has been done better. It feels like a bad 80s film but made in the 90s, making it just that little bit worse if that makes any sense. John C. McGinley plays a journalist who is after a story of a crime syndicate involving police corruption and a stolen coin. When his car is blown up in suspicious circumstances (with him inside), his best friend and restaurateur Ben (D.B. Sweeney) and his deaf personal trainer Jillian (Marlee Matlin) are thrown together under suspicion of a corrupt police detective (Martin Sheen) of knowing the whereabouts of a priceless historical coin. They don't know where it is and basically Marin Sheen bullies them for the next 90 minutes until the film's 'Scooby-Doo' style conclusion reveals the how, what and why (but not the who cares). Between tiresome scenes of overacting and puzzling action sequences, we learn that deaf people are human beings too, they're just like us except they are slightly more useless, adorable but still useless, except for lip reading, they're brilliant at lip reading, even when the person has their back to them, they can lip read them. It is important to remind deaf people that they are deaf in case they forget and one should make a big deal of their deafness at every possible opportunity. It's an odd gimmick that wears very thin, very fast. Basically, bad things happen and Jillian never hears it until Ben turns up, falls in love with her despite her deafness, hears the bad stuff for her and stops said bad stuff from happening thereon. That's pretty much it but much worse than it sounds. I'm a fan of D.B. Sweeney and or Martin Sheen but this film is dreadful and they are both dreadful. Why do all 80s heroes (this is an 80s film made in the 90s) live in lofts? Why does Martin Sheen's character live in a house on the end of a massive pole? Why does Ben's mum live on a house in the middle of a lake? The location spotter was at least pulling his/her weight I suppose, when no one else was.