After scoring big in a special-effects bonanza about
shape-shifting robot-cars from outer space, Shia LaBeouf apparently decided
that he needed to make a movie that was really far-fetched and ridiculous. He's found one in D.J. Caruso's
achingly idiotic cyber-thriller Eagle Eye, a big-budget, high-concept audience-insulter that begins
preposterously and grows increasingly nonsensical until it's the unintentional
laugh riot of the year, or at least the season. Executive producer Steven
Spielberg reportedly came up with the premise, but being a savvy businessman,
he wisely pawned his bad idea off to the not-so-great Caruso.
LaBeouf stars as an unusually aggressive copy-shop employee
who begins receiving mysterious cell-phone calls from a female voice that
begins ordering him around with the infernal condescension of the cyber-shrew who
voices GPS guidance systems. This sinister voice represents an entity with
godlike powers, who forces LaBeouf and hard-luck single mother Michelle
Monaghan to do its incredibly convoluted bidding. Under its sadistic guidance, LaBeouf
instantly morphs from black-sheep fuck-up and wage slave to a daring, fearless
cross between James Bond and Jackie Chan.
Caruso and his battery of screenwriters try to keep
audiences so distracted and disoriented by a never-ending onslaught of stunts, explosions,
and car crashes (Eagle Eye threatens Blues
Brothers' record for most gratuitous car
crashes and most smashed police vehicles in a film set partially in Chicago) that
they won't pay attention to the aggregation of plot holes that constitutes the
film's script. The film aims for 2001 by
way of a paranoid '70s conspiracy thriller, but ends up somewhere closer to Short Circuit crossed with Enemy Of The State. Just because a film exploits widespread fear of computers
and their ubiquity doesn't mean it should feel like it was created by the
Gimmicktron Hackbot 3000 screenplay-writing program. As a thriller about
technology run amok and a government that spies on its citizens to nefarious
ends, Eagle Eye should boast all sorts
of contemporary resonance. But it'd probably feel just a little bit timelier
and more relevant if it took place in a universe that bore even the faintest
resemblance to our own.