Secret in Their Eyes - C-

Rated PG-13, 111 minutes

Chiwetel Ejiofor and Julia Roberts

If the eyes are the window to the soul, then the well-acted but downbeat new drama "Secret in Their Eyes," in spite of a superb cast, is soulless. Directed and written by Billy Ray, who penned the first "Hunger Games" and the Tom Hanks hit "Captain Phillips," Secret" is a remake of the much-better and Oscar-winning 2009 Argentine film "The Secret in Their Eyes," which won Best Foreign Film that year. A team of FBI investigators, Ray (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Jess (Oscar-winner Julia Roberts), and their District Attorney supervisor Claire (Oscar-winner Nicole Kidman), are torn apart when they discover that Jess's teenage daughter has been brutally and inexplicably murdered. Thirteen years later, Ray returns to Los Angeles after uncovering a new lead that he feels can permanently resolve the case. The flashback-heavy "Secret in Their Eyes," unlike the more affecting Argentine-version, lacks meat and complexity with an ending that's mishandled by director and writer Ray. The flashback-heavy script spends too much going back and forth without exploring some key points, such as the unrequited romance between Ray and Claire not to mention some key character motivations. The main cast, including Ejiofor and Kidman are uniformly solid, but it's the mousy Roberts who gives the film's strongest, most memorable performance, exhibiting the perfect amount of grief and pain of an anguished mother, though we don't see enough of who she really is; on that note, the disappointing final act and ending is more of a letdown than shocking, lacking an emotional build-up to it. Character actors Dean Norris ("Under the Dome"), Michael Kelly ("House of Cards"), Joe Coe and Alfred Molina round out the talented cast, and all of whom in get in a good scene or two. There are a handful of compelling moments - the scene in which Roberts discovers her murdered daughter is particularly heartbreaking - but "Secret in Their Eyes" isn't the powerhouse mystery hoped for, rather more of a simmering, standard procedural whose title is a bit misleading given how little, if anything, is mentioned about what the eyes may be hiding, in this case a great movie.