***SPOILERS**** Trying to copy the 1967 classic "Wait Until Dark" about a blind young woman trapped in her apartment with these three hoods trying to find the "dope" that's hidden there. "Hear no Evil" is about a deft young woman who unknowingly has on her a valuable 4th century b.c. Greek coin worth a million dollars. With a number of psychos trying to get it, the coin, off her but that's where the comparison between the two movies ends.
Opra freak police let. Brock, Martin Sheen, who looking forward to a hefty retirement package has one of his "busts" on the street T.W ,Billie Worley,get off easy if he gets him this coin to take care of his future ventures as a man of music and leisure.
After murdering the museum guard T.W takes off with the coin but Let. Brock trying to double-cross him, and keep T.W from blackmailing him, has T.W run over and killed only to find out that the coin isn't on him. T.W's contact and friend news reporter Mick O'Malley, John C. McGilney, is given the coin to hold for him for safekeeping. Mick then hides it in his hearing-impaired girlfriends Jillian Shanahan, Marlee Matin, vibration activated beeper. Just as Let. Brock and his men raid his apartment.
O'Malley getting worked over by Let. Brock, at the police station and in his squad car, is given 24 hours to come up with the coin or else. In a last desperate act of survival Mick get's his friend restaurant owner Ben Kendell, O.B. Sweeny, to lend him his car and $1,000.00 in cash to get out of town. The car later explodes and crashes into the river as it's crossing a bridge with O'Malley in it.
With the Greek coin nowhere to be found a determined Let. Brock keys in on innocent and unsuspecting Jillian as the only person alive who either knows where the coin is or has it in her apartment. Since that's the last place where the now obviously deceased O'Malley was. Up to that point the movie "Hear no Evil" is a fast and what looks like a spine tingling thriller, a lot like the classic "Wait Until Dark".But then when both Ben and Jillian get together in an effort to stymie Let. Brock from getting the stolen coin the movie starts to go downhill fast.
Besides Let. Brock a new villain shows up looking for the coin. Which by his appearance, and having a wool cap pulled over his head, isn't at all Let. Brock and also isn't working for or with him, who can that man be? Almost strangling Jillian's room-mate Grace, Christina Carlisi, the black clad intruder is on Jillian's and her new boyfriend's Ben trail for the rest of the movie. Even after Let. Brock is arrested and put behind bars by the F.B.I who together with Jillian & Ben set a trap for him.
The "suprise ending" is anything but surprising since it's obvious, if you've seen enough whodunits, who the killer is. It has Jillian running for her life from the killer all through the house that she and Ben are staying in, at his mom's in the country. Jillian outsmarts and does in the killer just as he not only revealed who he is but after he got his hands on the coin that he was after to get.
Plodding and unconvincing "Hear no Evil" has no real suspense or terror in it. A competent, but all too brief, performance by Martin Sheen, as the brutal and utterly ruthless Det. Brock. Still he's out of the picture and the story some half-way thorough the movie. It's after that the the film seems to try to compensate for him by having the unknown, dressed in black, killer put on center stage which sinks the film. You start to think why him, when you find out who he is, of all people when he could have gotten the coin just by asking for it from Jillian? Did he hit himself on the head so hard that it's caused his thought process to severely malfunction?
The real life hearing impaired Marlee Matlin did her best trying to look and act scared and terrified. As she's chased all throughout the film by Det. Brock and his goons. As well as the mysterious tall dark and deadly stranger. It also good to see for once a deft person who's not only played by a deft actor, or actress, but also able to talk as well as communicate without almost exclusively using sign language.
