Eagle Eye

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

Your enjoyment of Eagle Eye is dependent on not knowing a game-changing twist that occurs at the one hour mark, and how certain plot points are related to the overall plan. To the credit of the marketing department, the ads have stayed on target in explaining the movie's initial hook and not much more: Jerry (Shia LaBeouf) and Rachel (Michelle Monaghan) get phone calls from a mysterious woman who blackmails them into doing what she says and can seemingly control everything.

By everything, I mean everything: she can call anyone's cell phone, listen in, change traffic lights at a whim, alter news tickers, remote-control a jet, and even operate forklifts and garbage trucks. It's a brief throwaway line, but I'm pretty sure at one point she tells Jerry, LaBeouf's character, that she was able to put together a psychological profile of him by combing his Facebook and MySpace pages.

In other words, it's a paranoid technology nightmare story. (It seems as though it takes place 5-10 years in the future, but it's never specified.) The woman on the phone keeps referring to "We," which we have to assume is the most well-connected, on-the-ball, technologically-advanced terrorist group ever assembled. Funnily enough, once we find out more about Them, their power to control everything simultaneously becomes more plausible and more ridiculous. You'll know what I mean.

We don't know Their true intentions, of course, but part of it might have to do with Jerry's twin brother, who was employed by the government and recently died mysteriously. And part of it might have to do with a recent bombing the U.S. government carried out in the Middle East. They were hoping to hit a well-connected terrorist, but instead wiped out a bunch of innocents. The Secretary of Defense (Michael Chiklis) had opposed the attack, but the president approved it, and now retaliatory terrorist attacks are happening on a daily basis. Maybe whatever Jerry and Rachel are embroiled in is one of them.

That's enough plot. Yeah, the movie has terrorists and government agents in it, but it's no more a political film than XXX: State of the Union was. It's a big, happily implausible blockbuster action movie, and on that level it totally succeeds. LaBeouf and Monaghan are both solid leads, although as the movie forces them to be in panic mode the whole time, there's not much room for "acting."

Their characters have an interesting dynamic -- he's a 20-ish slacker, she's a 30-ish single mom -- but the movie doesn't really do much with that, and eventually it seems like the age gap was created just so the movie wouldn't have to slow down in order for them to fall in love and have sex (although that might've been funny, if the woman on the phone kept calling the whole time). The lack of a romantic subplot isn't a bad thing, though, as it means Rachel ...