Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 26, 1994                   TAG: 9401250159
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By MIKE MAYO CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

`BLINK' IS TOO CLICHED FOR ITS OWN GOOD

A decent premise, an effective sense of place and a strong female protagonist are undercut by some lapses in internal logic and a lame conclusion. Given the strong track record of director Michael Apted - "Coal Miner's Daughter," "Class Action" - it could have been much better.

Emma Brody (Madeleine Stowe) was blinded at age 8 by her mother. She has become an independent, resourceful adult who makes a decent living as a fiddler with a Celtic band. With the help of her seeing-eye dog Ralph (Louie), she has little trouble getting around downtown Chicago. But she's still in line for a corneal transplant, and when matching organs become available, she doesn't hesitate.

The operation comes with an odd side effect, though. Emma's vision is distorted, and some images that she sees don't register in her brain until several hours later. So when the woman who lives in the apartment upstairs is murdered, Emma doesn't immediately realize that she saw the killer.

She tries to explain it all to police detective John Hallstrom (Aidan Quinn). But her condition, combined with the fact that she was hammering a jug of cheap wine on the night in question, makes her an unreliable witness. Still, she's all he has to go on, and it appears that our villain is another of those serial killers, who are so popular in books and movies these days.

That stereotype is symptomatic of the film's problems. The crime elements of the plot are either cliched or unbelievable; at one point Emma has a "flashback" to something she did not see, suggesting that her delayed vision is somehow psychic. The contrived ending could have come straight from a made-for-cable movie.

On the other hand, Emma is a fully developed, flawed character. Madeleine Stowe is completely believable all the way through, both as a blind woman and as a person who's seeing the world for the first time. In one nice scene, she takes a look at the various sides of Chicago with her new eyes and then asks her friend Candice (Laurie Metcalf) to show her something beautiful. That's when Dana Stevens' script is at its best.

Director Apted captures the rough charm of the city, and he does a fair job of injecting some tension into standard scenes - the chase through the train on the El, the stalker in the parking garage, etc.

But the best efforts of all concerned aren't enough to raise "Blink" above the level of genre entertainment.

Blink: **

A New Line release playing at the Tanglewood Mall. 106 min. Rated R for strong language, violence, sexual content, brief nudity.