The movie casts the always engaging Shia LaBeouf as Jerry Shaw, a hapless nobody caught up
in the cogs of domestic intrigue. He has just returned home to New York after his brother’s
funeral, and stops at an ATM where he discovers his normally empty bank account now contains
$750,000. As anyone would, he withdraws as much as he can fit in his pockets and heads
home, wondering what the hell is going on. He arrives at his dinky apartment to find it too
is no longer empty. It is now full, with all the chemicals and weaponry one might need to
commit a major act of terrorism. His phone rings. A mysterious voice on the other end warns
him he has only seconds to leave his apartment before the FBI arrives to arrest him.
Jerry ignores the warning and in shock, remains rooted to the floor until moments later
when the FBI’s foot soldiers come crashing through his window and drag him off to jail.
Jerry doesn’t stay in jail long, and soon the mysterious voice on the phone is directing
him on an unknown mission of unknown intent. The caller controls not only his cell
connection, but seemingly every other piece of technology on the planet. The voice pairs
him up with a mother named Rachel, who is forced to cooperate lest the voice murder her son.
That Jerry and Rachel are being used and manipulated is never in question; what is, is
whether they’re being used for good or for evil. The movie holds together as long as that
question remains hanging heavily in mid-air, even after we find out who it is that’s
controlling them, via a potentially ludicrous but surprisingly well handled plot twist.
It’s only in the third act that Eagle Eye starts to fall apart, when the battle lines
are drawn and we’re told just exactly who we’re supposed to root for. The little anarchist
inside me had more fun rooting for the other guy.
Though there is a passing attempt in the movie’s script to pose questions about the state
of American politics, Eagle Eye is first and foremost a big, dumb, action thriller. It
belongs smack dab in the middle of summer, why they’ve dropped it in September is something
of a puzzler. Caruso jam packs his movie with big car crashes and things blowing up. He
does a perfect imitation of a Michael Bay action flick, complete with his annoying, usually
pointless, shaky cam technique which more often than not, spoils the effect of something
really cool blowing up. Better filmmakers like Paul Greengrass know how to use violent
camera motion to suck the audience into the action, make them feel as if they’re a part of
what’s going on. Caruso lacks either the instincts or the subtlety to pull that off, and
simply shakes things around for no other reason than to disorient his audience. It’s a minor
annoyance really, most of the movie, what you can see of it, looks fantastic. More
importantly, the action is well paced and, especially for the first two-thirds of the movie,
thrilling. Cheap thrills is the real reason to be here, and Eagle Eye delivers.
The film’s supporting cast exists primarily to complement charismatic presence of Shia
LaBeouf. Billy Bob Thornton is a scene stealer as a no-nonsense FBI agent. Aside from
LaBeouf he’s the most interesting thing in the story, and really should have had a bigger
role in what’s going on. Rosario Dawson is another government investigator, and this is
the movie she turned down Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno to do. Her choice seemed
to make sense at the time, after all this is a big-budget, Spielberg produced movie.
Getting involved with a Spielberg project is a good thing, isn’t it? Seeing her in the
movie now though, you have to wonder what she was thinking. She turned down a starring
role in an edgy, heavily buzzed comedy to play what amounts to little more than a throwaway,
stiff, empty, government agent part which almost no one will remember. Michelle Monaghan
is similarly forgettable in this film. But then she always is. There’s nothing wrong with
her, it’s just a blank, standard “girl in Hollywood thriller” character.
