Movie Review: Eagle Eye

Eagle Eye (2008) 

Directed by D.J Caruso 

Written by John Glenn, Travis Adam Wright, Hillary Seitz

Starring Shia LeBeouf, Michelle Monaghan, Rosario Dawson, Michael Chiklis, Anthony Mackie

Release Date September 26th, 2008

Published September 25th, 2008

Director D.J Caruso has had a strange career. He debuted with a funky modern noir character piece called The Salton Sea. He followed that brilliant indie feature with a braindead studio flick, Taking Lives, with Angelina Jolie and Ethan Hawke. He followed that with another piece of junk, the Matthew McConaughey-Al Pacino thriller Two For The Money.

Then Caruso remade Hitchcock's Rear Window with a modern twist and Disturbia returned the talent of the guy who made The Salton Sea. Now, reteamed with Disturbia star Shia LeBeouf, Caruso has taken another step back. With the chase movie junk of Eagle Eye, Caruso demonstrates a talent for blowing stuff up with a nihilists eye for consequence.

Jerry Shaw (LeBeouf) is something of a loser. Though he had opportunities, like a full ride to Stanford, he blew them off to become a copy technician in Chicago. One day Jerry hears that his twin brother has passed away. The brother was a military genius with a top secret job that neither Jerry or his parents knew anything about.

Days after his brothers death, Jerry's once empty bank account begins spilling cash on the street in front of him. The euphoria lasts until he arrives home and finds a large weapons cache awaiting him. A mysterious woman's voice on the phone tells him he has been activated and has 1 minute to get out of the apartment. He is captured by the FBI lead by Agent Morgan (Billy Bob Thornton).

While in custody that mysterious voice somehow ends up on his one phone call and once again Jerry is given a chance to escape. Meanwhile, a woman named Rachel Holloman is told by that same mysterious voice that her son will die if she doesn't get in a car and pick up Jerry. These two strangers are now pawns in a game of nationwide terror and can only follow orders to stay alive.

The plot of Eagle Eye is mousetrap efficient. The stakes are set and the players are put in place with proper motivations. The failing of Eagle Eye comes in not knowing what to do once all the pieces are ready to fall into place. The unfortunate fallback position of director D.J Caruso are a series of ever increasingly violent car chases.

These characters, their plight, could be interesting if the writers and director had serious intentions and an over arching point of view. But they don't. What they have is a plot on which to stage a series of car chases that at one point take on the comic pose of The Blues Brothers with nameless, faceless Chicago cop cars getting, flipped, flopped and smashed with little regard for the cops inside.

Shia LeBeouf has a tremendous talent for bringing the audience inside his character's troubles. We identify with him quickly because he is not the most handsome, or the biggest, or buffest action hero. He is street smart and witty and not every solution he invents actually works. He brings to Jerry Shaw the same qualities he brought to his hero in Disturbia and Transformers, a sense of awe of the situation he is in.

So often action movies or thrillers have characters who quickly adapt to the most outlandish circumstance. Not LeBeouf who allows himself to look and be out of his depth. It is a seeming lack of ego that endears him to audiences. Now, there are a few moments in Eagle Eye that force him to be a little more adept than your average person, but not for long and LeBeouf smoothes it over with good humor and a sly wink.

The script for Eagle Eye lets LeBeouf down by not giving his character more of an inner life. Jerry reacts to everything around him very well but the why behind his plight is weak. Eagle Eye wants to be about paranoia, technological emperialism, and big brother government. Those ideas are there in small bites but the overall purpose of Eagle is chase scene carnage.

There was an opportunity for Eagle Eye to be a modern techno thriller with a brain. D.J Caruso has that kind of talent. Sadly, Caruso has coopted his talent to the mainstream movie audience and now only delivers hyper-adrenalized, highly stylized, violence that measures on the Michael Bay scale. The funk is there in Eagle Eye, in the performance of Shia LeBeouf and the slightly offbeat energy of Billy Bob Thornton, but it is overwhelmed by mindless carnage.