PREMIERE'S REVIEW (posted 9/26/08)

Would-be terrorist training camps, shameless violations of the Geneva Conventions, and a president who sounds more than a little Bush-y: For all the topicality stuffed into its first five minutes, Eagle Eye lacks any real pertinence. It's an empty-headed look at a national problem with modern surveillance society, but if everyone acted as stupidly as the incredulous screenplay would have you believe, then it's safe to say the movie inadvertently reflects, rather than critiques, the insanity of our times.

In this head-smacking thriller (directed by Disturbia helmer D.J. Caruso) about the Patriot Act gone awry, cynical college dropout Jerry (Shia LaBeouf, on autopilot) winds up in a run-jump-duck series of escapes with moody single mother Rachel (Michelle Monaghan) as an ominous voice racks up untold minutes issuing cold orders over a cell phone. The two helpless victims find themselves surrounded by hacked mechanical devices at every turn, forcing their compliance, but the gimmick gets old fast. Jerry, unjustifiably arrested for the anonymous delivery of weapons to his apartment in the wake of his twin brother's mysterious military death, manages to escape custody after scrolling text on a marquee outside the window of the station tells him to jump. And board the next subway. Then a stranger's phone gets a text telling Jerry to get off at the next station. Which he does. And so on.

Who is the unidentifiable female presence on the other line? What purpose does she have for Jerry? And why has she paired him with Rachel, a mean-spirited paralegal with bad parenting issues? These questions get answered, but not resolved. The story bombards us with the woes of modern safety measures — from evil GPS systems to troublesome airport security — that ultimately combine into the principal antagonist, both literally and figuratively: technology. At one point, Billy Bob Thornton, as a hilariously exaggerated FBI caricature, informs Jerry during an early interrogation scene that it's a bad time to be in the terrorism business. Maybe, but it's a worse time to be in the terrorism movie business.

True, The Dark Knight grappled with the morality of wiretapping and the world watched with rapt attention, but it also had a badass guy in a bat suit beating the crap out of a maniacal clown. The newspaper headline stuff was just a bonus. Eagle Eye devotes a whole feature-length spectacle to a contemporary fear (based on a idea, shockingly enough, by Steven Spielberg), but refuses to examine the situation outside of concluding that secretive government operations are bad, bad, bad. Because it doesn't offer any further analysis, Eagle Eye does a fine job of inadvertently stating the problem by simply becoming one of its symptoms.

— Eric Kohn