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Eagle Eye
Directed by: D J Caruso Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Billy Bob Thornton, Michelle Monaghan, Rosario Dawson, Michael Chiklis Synopsis: Jerry Shaw, a college drop-out working in a copy shop, returns home from the funeral of his twin brother to discover his bank account full of money and his apartment stuffed with boxes of special-ops ordinance and bomb-making equipment. Then his phone rings and a mysterious woman tells him the FBI are about to knock down his front door. Meanwhile, a young single mother called Rachel is told by the same female voice to do as instructed or her son will be killed...
Essentially an update of the Tony Scott/Will Smith thriller, “Enemy of the State”, Eagle Eye is 10 times louder, brasher and preposterous, but is also about 10 times more fun. Director Caruso and star LaBeouf have combined for the second time, having last year provided the sleeper hit, “Disturbia”. It looks like this could be 2 for 2. 
LaBeouf doesn’t have a lot of range –yet – but he is very good at the sullen young man with a chip on his shoulder, and that suits his character down to a tee. He has an everyman quality, someone to whom extraordinary things are occurring. Michelle Monaghan, who was so good as Robert Downey Jr’s romantic foil in “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang”, is very convincing as the single mom who’ll do anything to get her son back. Adding a more light touch is Billy Bob Thornton as the NSA agent trying to track the pair down, similar to Tommy Lee Jones’s Gerrard in The Fugitive. Michael Chiklis (Vic Mackey on tv’s The Shield) pulls out a top drawer performance which wouldn’t be out of place in The West Wing. Eagle Eye is full of action sequences that would make Michael Bay green with envy but shot with a more straightforward style. Two sequences in particular stand out – a thrilling car chase which sees more car destruction than The Blues Brothers and a chase sequence involving an Unmanned Aircraft towards the climax.The movie runs on a high momentum from the moment Jerry discovers the arms cache in his apartment, but when it stops to catch it’s breath with the Big Reveal (who exactly is on the other end of the phone?) it almost trips over itself as the audience goes, “huh?”. Luckily the movie still has a couple of Big Scenes to play out leaving the audience no time to ponder the implausibility’s until in the foyer afterward. There are one or two moments where the movie feels the need to pummel home the point that Jerry and Rachel are being manipulated from a remote location. During the aforementioned Big Car Chase, they drive through a junk yard where the crushers and cranes are manipulated by remote control. Just in case we didn’t realise this, the camera zooms into the empty cockpit of one of the cranes where there is a monitor with a flashing “REMOTE CONTROL” message. And then, after the chase, Billy Bob’s character also muses on the “REMOTE CONTROL” aspect of the cranes, which is emblazoned on the side of the machine. GAHH! There is a lot of pontification at the end of the movie about the pro’s and cons of overt surveillance of your own people in the name of protecting them from an unknown but viable threat, and its played out over an ending which I believe is the result of test screening. I personally believe the alternative ending would have had more of an impact (and feeds into my belief of what a hero is). Verdict: After an exemplary summer of high quality blockbusters, it was probably the right decision to delay the release of this because it would have been lost. It’s not a great film, but is very pertinent to the current fears of Big Brother culture and provides a lot of solid escapist fun. 7 out of 10 (MikeOutWest)
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