Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
10/8/08
There are two kinds of great
movies. Some illuminate the human condition, captivate us with their
ingenious, labyrinthine plots, or delight us with unforgettable characters.
Others are just wicked awesome. Eagle Eye falls into the later
category, telling an improbable sci-fi action story with such commitment
and relentless gusto that it's easy to ignore how patently ridiculous many
of its' events are. Disturbia director
D.J. Caruso reunites with his star Shia LaBeouf while doing his best Michael
Bay impression under the eye of producer Steven Spielberg, who did the
same job on Disturbia and the Bay-directed
LaBeouf bone-cruncher Transformers.
A pure popcorn thrill ride with sensational stunt sequences and a plot
so overheated it pops like Orville Redenbacher for two solid hours, Eagle
Eye is not a movie for the discriminating cineaste. But for fans
of joyful mayhem, it's not to be missed.
Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf)
is a loser: working at the Copy Cabana after dropping out of Stanford,
he's so distanced from his family that he hasn't spoken to twin brother
Ethan in over two years. Then comes a fateful call: Ethan has
died. When Jerry returns from the funeral, he finds Seven Hundred
Thousand Dollars in his bank account and an apartment full of guns, bombs
and fertilizer. The moment he discovers this terror starter kit,
his phone rings: a mysterious female voice (an uncredited Julianne
Moore) tells him to leave the apartment or he'll be arrested in seconds.
He doesn't, and he is, by Agent Thomas Morgan (Billy Bob Thornton) who
vows to dance the Guantanamo Shuffle all over him until a mysterious change
of orders allows Jerry his one phone call. It's that voice again,
and this time it tells him to duck: a crane smashes through the side
of the building and he's got to jump to survive. On the ground, the
whole world seems to be steering him in the direction The Voice demands:
when he tries to take a subway the opposite way, the train slams on the
breaks and starts running backwards. Soon enough, he's sharing a
car with Rachel Holliman (Michelle Monaghan), who's also been chatting
with The Voice: it's threatened to kill her son (Cameron Boyce) if
she doesn't do as she's told. Morgan and his people are in hot pursuit
and chase them through a wrecking yard where the cranes attack the Feds
and toss their cars around like tinker toys. Jerry and Rachel continue
to receive this sort of aid as they go from point to point on a journey
that brings them into contact with other civilians similarly blackmailed
by that voice. But what kind of person, what kind of organization
could possibly pull off the total control of all the nation's computer
systems they've witnessed first hand? The answer lies with Ethan's
last assignment, on a top secret project called Eagle Eye.
Essentially a cross between
Live Free or Die Hard and 2001:
A Space Odyssey, Eagle Eye jams the accelerator to the floor
early on and never, ever lets it up. The plot is more than a little
nuts, but give the four credited screenwriters their due: while this
may not be the government-destroying conspiracy I might come up with myself,
it does all make its' own kind of crazy sense. And even if you're
not buying the sci-fi conceit behind those evil phone calls, Caruso keeps
everything moving so quickly, and stages the action sequences with such
reckless abandon, that there's little time to worry about logic until the
credits start to roll.
Let's talk about those action
sequences. I mentioned Michael Bay earlier, and I will say that they're
a tad on the over-edited side. From time to time, you're gonna lose
track of exactly what you're looking at. But I was in a forgiving
mood because what I could follow was pretty friggin' awesome. The
wrecking yard chase was my favorite because it's as original as it is kinetic.
The last major stunt sequence, with Jerry and Agent Morgan besieged by
vehicular carnage while fleeing a drone plane through a traffic tunnel,
owes more than a little to the aforementioned Die Hard sequel, but
it's got a few new tricks up its' sleeve, including one of the most improbably
successful acts of selfless heroism I've ever witnessed on film.
The scale of both sequences, and a couple others besides, is immense, and
Caruso and his production achieve that most elusive of movie spectacular
goals: the feeling that the action occurs on a canvas totally unencumbered
by a budget. As with Disturbia, Caruso
manages to take familiar ideas and invest them with more suspense and gravitas
than you might expect. He's a popcorn director to watch.
Now, about that plot. *****SPOILER
ALERT: READ NO FURTHER IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHO'S ON THE OTHER
END OF THE PHONE***** Audiences will likely be divided on Eagle
Eye's nifty mid-point twist based first on their tolerance for pulpy
sci-fi and then again by their requirement that said pulpy sci-fi have
a basis in reality. Aria the Super-Computer (skillfully voiced by
Moore) is pretty much the ultimate “Computer that can do anything,” a genre
tradition that goes back to the first time somebody worried about who might
be watching them through those newfangled traffic cameras. She's
got fully cross-referenced records from every camera, file, Internet connection
and library card in existence and as such knows more about you than even
you do. She is, as intended, the Patriot Act Incarnate, and I'm just
paranoid enough to think that was a really nifty idea for a supervillain.
Her motivation for specifically targeting Jerry is quite clever, and if
the film's gaggle of writers could come up with only one through-provoking
idea, they could do a lot worse than the way Aria's computer brain reconciles
the Declaration of Independence and the Bush Doctrine. On a more
visceral level, the design of Aria, with the single giant computer eye
pouring over all known data, is pretty darn snazzy. Given that the
computer has every known resource at its' disposal and chooses to refit
a child's trumpet to play a particular note that will cause an explosive
crystal in a woman's necklace to destroy Washington DC, I suspect a lot
of those data tables contain old James Bond movies. But if you think
that's stupid rather than campily audacious, Eagle Eye will have
probably lost you long before the climax anyway. *****END OF SPOILERS*****
The characters are all familiar
types, but those types are energized by strong performances. Shiftless
Brother of Fallen Hero Jerry walks just the right line between the loser
he is and the hero he could be thanks to a smartly modulated turn by LaBeouf
that shows more emotional depth than I've seen from him in the past.
I'm a big fan of Monaghan, and her sexy everywoman skills serve her well
as Selfless Single Mom Rachel. I couldn't help but be amused that
the movie feels the need to keep things chaste between the heroes (he gets
a single peck on the cheek at the end): is it because she's a mere
ten years older than he is? Think the film would be so coy if the
age difference swung the opposite way? Thornton is certainly primed
to search every warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse and outhouse as the Relentless
Agent and Dawson is smart and courageous as the Tough Lady Agent.
Michael Chiklis walks a nice line between the softie roles he took early
in his career and the tough guys he specializes in now as the Secretary
of Defense. Madison Mason is glimpsed only briefly as The President,
but he does a perfect job of projecting just the kind of idiot who'd walk
into the trap that's set for him.
Eagle Eye is very
far from perfect, but it passes the primary Action Spectacular test with
flying colors: it's exciting and engaging from beginning to end.
It's also kinda nuts, but given the story it's trying to tell, some of
us will see that as an plus. You know who you are. |
