Parents' Guide to Blind

Part romance and part white-collar crime thriller, with a smattering of inspirational-teacher drama, this is a well-acted but utterly forgettable New York melodrama about second chances. It's unclear whether audiences even remember that Baldwin and Moore made a movie together before, so the fact that they're re-teaming isn't exactly as compelling as it might be if Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, or Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams paired up on screen again. These days, Baldwin is an A-list comedic actor thanks to his work on 30 Rock and SNL, while Moore is still best known for her work in past decades. Neither is particularly well-served by this mediocre drama, which is too scattered to tell a compelling story.

Blind disappoints from the thriller angle, since there's no satisfying comeuppance for McDermott's Mark, whose character gets darker and more violent as the movie progresses. There's also not much closure regarding two younger protégés, who are as different as the men they admire: Mark's spying, sycophantic Wall Street wannabe (Drew Moerlein) and Bill's aspiring-writer student (Steven Prescod, a real-life spoken-word artist). Prescod and Baldwin's interactions (including one amusing, Karate Kid-like moment of cleaning as instruction) would have made for a better movie than the formulaic romance at Blind's messy heart. Ultimately most of the characters here are more cliché than fully developed, especially Suzanne, who seems too unbelievably naive to be a Manhattan socialite.