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Friday, September 26, 2008
‘Eagle Eye’ starts sharply, then loses focus
If I could review only the first half of Eagle Eye, I would call it a suspenseful, crackling techno-thriller.
Alas, I have to review the entirely of Eagle Eye, so I must call it a barely entertaining, sputtering techno-thriller that becomes increasingly stupid and implausible as it goes along.
Director DJ Caruso seems to be making a career out of filming passable thrillers starring Shia LaBeouf that rip off older and much better movies. Last year, Caruso’s Disturbia thrilled many young audience members who had probably never heard of, much less seen, Hitchcock’s Rear Window. This year, Caruso and his crew have made their inferior version of a much more recent film: Tony Scott’s Enemy of the State.
Enemy of the State, which came out 10 years ago, starred Will Smith as a man on the run from an agency that used hi-tech Big Brother tools to track his every movement. It wasn’t exactly great art, but it made the world seem threatening in a new way. Eagle Eye doesn’t so much improve on Enemy of the State as it updates it, with even higher-tech Big Brother tools, but a less compelling story.
The movie stars LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan as unwilling participants in a sinister plot. LaBeouf is a slacker who’s getting over the death of his much more accomplished identical twin brother. When he comes home one day, a calm female voice calls him on the phone, ordering him to follow instructions. That same voice appears on Monaghan’s phone, ordering her to comply, lest her young son be killed.
Eagle Eye starts very strongly when it seems like the organization commanding LaBeouf and Monaghan can control every electronic gadget in sight. When the two have to elude the FBI in a car chase, the controller changes the traffic light patterns to speed our heroes through while the FBI agents crash and burn. (That’s a rip-off too, from The Italian Job remake, but the scene sill works.)
For roughly the first hour, Caruso does a decent job of ratcheting up the thrills, even if some of his action scenes suffer from overediting, as so many do these days. Then, we find out who the nemesis is, and that’s when Eagle Eye starts to blink. The villain is completely derivative (Hint: Red eye), and the movie’s climax is absurd, even for a “turn your brain off” movie. I kept saying incredulous phrases to myself, like “Oh, come on,” “Yeah, sure” and “Riiiiiight.”
As ridiculous as the movie gets, I still enjoyed it while I watched it. The actors help to redeem it. LaBeouf and Monaghan seem more like mother and son than a potential couple, since LaBeouf never looks any older than 17, no matter how much facial hair he grows, but the two still have solid chemistry together. And just as he did in Armageddon, Billy Bob Thornton alleviates an extremely silly story with a few memorable zingers as the lead FBI man after LaBeouf and Monaghan.
Eagle Eye aims to deliver dumb fun, and it does - but it would have been a better movie if it were less dumb and more fun.
GRADE: B-
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