Grade: B-

Verdict: If you love hankie movies, get ready to have a ball — and take a full Kleenex box.

Details: Starring Jennifer Lopez and James Caviezel. Rated R for profanity, violence and a scene of sexuality. One hour, 44 minutes. Rate it: Write your own review

Review: Jennifer Lopez's latest flick is being pre-sold in trailers and TV ads as a mystery and action-adventure. You know, fast-paced clips with cops running and that telltale line, “He's a ghost.”

Don't believe it. While cops do run a lot in “Angel Eyes,” it's really a tried-and-true love story. It's not all gooey and sweet, but this love flick means characters are forever working up the nerve to say they're sorry.

It is, especially near its end, weepy drama and, for what it is, not bad.

Jennifer Lopez plays Chicago cop Sharon Pogue, a great-looking gal so lonely she takes a rest on her bed girded in her bulletproof vest. She's also burdened with — shhhh! — family secrets.

Enter James Caviezel (“The Thin Red Line”) as Catch Lambert, sort of a walking blank, a great-looking guy so intent on escaping his past he lives in a nearly empty apartment. He spends his time walking the streets of Chicago and one day spies Sharon as she sits in a cafe eating and joking with her cop pals.

He's entranced.

Catch, you see, is the survivor of a year-old, brutal car wreck and the guy Sharon, working the massive accident scene, gently coaxed to “hang in there.”

We're not giving away anything by telling you all this. If you couldn't figure it out by yourself 15 minutes into the flick, you've wrecked your brain seeing “The Mummy Returns” too many times.

Anyway, Catch has his own family-connected issues. And you've got a full hour or so of touch-and-go romantic encounters before you need to reach for a Kleenex.

“Angel Eyes” works for several reasons. It's got a decent sense of humor as Catch and Sharon verbally banter in their initial encounters. The movie's got the guts not to iron out all its characters' problems (let's just say all the issues aren't cleanly resolved). And, though some of the plot stretches believability, Lopez and Caviezel are such an endearing couple many moviegoers won't care.

In some ways, “Angel Eyes” is a lot like Caviezel's earlier and popular flick “Frequency.” It may not be great moviemaking, but it does work.

— Bob Longino, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution