Parents' Guide to I See You

The makers of the ungainly I See You omitted nary an item from the list of generic thriller must-haves, so nothing about this feels original, fresh, especially scary, or worth one's time. Ominous music accompanies such neutral activities as a car driving into a garage. A copycat child kidnapper/murderer is on the loose and, sadly, that's a scenario that's been done over and over in other movies, most of them far better than this. Suspicion is cast on many characters. The cops are seemingly baffled. Irrelevant subplots provide red herrings. There's a marriage recovering from an extramarital affair, there's an angsty teen, there's a big house where for some reason no one ever turns the lights on while looking for intruders. Everyone seems hearing-impaired when it comes to footsteps sneaking up on them.

In the house, the goings-on are so weird that the filmmakers have to tell the whole story again through flashbacks to explain what's been happening. A man implausibly shows up in broad daylight at his lover's home and paws at her, so oblivious to the inappropriateness of his appearance as to make us question his sanity, and that of the filmmaker who would include such a clumsy plot turn. People are drugged, bludgeoned, shot, and axed. In defter hands, a similar story might have some punch but, as is, this amounts to a big yawn.