TVB was very smug about the success of The Odyssey, so much so that someone has clearly decided to try the Assante Factor again tonight to try and bump up the ratings. Armand Assante, who was so noble and heroic as Odysseus is back as another wandering soul, this time a blind marksman called Canaan in a very silly movie called Blind Justice (Pearl, 9.30 pm).
Canaan appears from nowhere with nothing but the clothes on his back and the sunglasses on his face, oh and a small, cuddly baby. He is as blind as a bat but he is still the sharpest shooter in town. Preposterous? Absurd? Not in this movie, in this tale Canaan's other senses have been so sharpened by the loss of his sight, that he can hear his victims.
Given this, it should really only be a matter of time before his enemies catch on to his technique and start tiptoeing around. But of course they don't. Canaan is supposed to take the poor baby back to its family, but instead he becomes involved in a saga about a bent cavalry officer, a lot of silver and a bandit.
Elizabeth Shue plays a nurse called Caroline who, as well as being handy for baby-sitting, turns out to be the only decent citizen in town. The year after this movie was made she played Sera in Leaving Las Vegas. After that, she has left such made-for-cable nonsense behind her.
Assante has something about him that always smacks of showiness; it is the reason he was so good in The Mambo Kings, and in the title role of the TV mini-series Gotti, where he played a mafia boss. But the same quality was slightly annoying in Odysseus, and completely out of place in this movie, especially as Canaan ends up being a kind of Helen Keller hitman, overcoming not just one but two disabilities to right wrongs and bring the bad guys to justice.
The film on the other side was always meant to be a comedy, rather than unintentionally becoming one. The Truth About Cats and Dogs (World, 9.35pm) is a rather brilliant comedy in fact, an all-girl twist on one of the funniest, and saddest love stories of them all, Cyrano de Bergerac.
