2 stars out of five "Eye of the Beholder" Multiple gratuitous Ashley Judd bathtub scenes = Rated R! Somewhere amongst the calm mess that is "Eye of the Beholder" is a center that must have looked Hitchcockian on paper.

The story of a British intelligence agent of sorts, appropriately named The Eye (Ewan McGregor), who is assigned to follow the son of an ambassador caught in an embezzling scheme, "Eye of the Beholder" begins as a savvy techno gadget thriller. It later becomes a slow burning cross country game of cat and mouse when The Eye begins to follow serial murderer/seductress Joanna Eris (Ashley Judd), who's constantly on the run from her past, her present, and her future. By the end, it's a love story of lost souls, kindred spirits and astrology with religious overtones.

When it's all said and done, the audience leaves in a state of entranced confusion, and you get the feeling that the filmmakers did, too.

"Eye of the Beholder" is not as new as it seems. Like many dog-day-of-January releases, it's been sitting around on studio shelves collecting dust for some time now, to the point where its actual hopeless release is just a mere formality. The fact that you walk away feeling as such is not a good thing.

The daughter we see on screen with The Eye, we learn, is a figment of his imagination. His wife and daughter left The Eye some time ago, seeing as how he's rarely able to pull himself away from his computer screens or his work. The Eye's only friend and confidante in this world is his co-worker/guardian angel (k.d. lang!), who watches over him via video screens like Big Brother from their Washington headquarters. But The Eye decides to ditch her and his job and to pursue Joanna full time, which leads to him following her through a sea of wigs, baths, personas, lingerie and men that she (literally) quickly disposes of.

The Eye is incomplete; it's obvious that the departure of his wife and daughter has left him with a hole inside. We later learn of a similar inner gap within Joanna - she was abandoned by her father at a very early age - and it doesn't take Bill Nye The Science Guy to figure out where the story goes from there.

It's not until a peroxide-dyed sleazeass (Jason Priestley!) shows up in the final reels that the fun begins. After he courts a helpless Joanna and brings her back to someone's (his?) pad, a run down tool shed, he decides to beat the tar out of her after she refuses to shoot smack with him. He then, in turn, gets bloodied (like Jared Leto in "Fight Club," but not quite as bad) by a raging Eye, who decides to interfere with the proceedings in his latest attempt to save Joanna. His end fate? He gets placed in the trunk of a car and driven out to the middle of the desert, where the car is rigged to drive in circles until it runs out of gas. My, how the years have been bad to Brandon Walsh.

(Side note: Ashley Judd has played opposite "90210" studs before - check your local video store for "Normal Life," where she played a pot-smoking aspiring astrologist cum bank robber, married to maladjusted bank robbing officer of the law Luke Perry. Two thumbs up.)

Not quite abysmal, "Eye of the Beholder" is just a little lost. Ewan McGregor, underplaying and calm, is good as always, as is Judd, who's serene killer could have been much showier and, well, bad. And there was actually a point in the movie where I was convinced that every film should star a dirty Jason Priestley as a horse-shooting psycho. It's just that writer/director Stephen Elliott ("The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert") is just somewhat mismatched in what this "Eye" is seeing.

This "Eye" is better left unseen.