Review: “Eagle Eye”

Last night my wife and I had the privilege of seeing an advanced screening of the movie Eagle Eye, thanks to Paramount Pictures and local morning radio host Elliot in the Morning.  The movie is listed as an action/mystery/thriller and takes place in modern day America, staring Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan with Rosaria Dawson, Billy Bob Thornton, and Michael Chiklis rounding out the cast.  Eagle Eye is a movie that dances on the edge of several excellent ideas, but never looks in the right direction or even acknowledges where it is.  If you’re looking for a decidedly decent action-thriller movie to go see this weekend, you’d probably enjoy Eagle Eye but otherwise it comes out as a definitive rental movie.

Critical Score: 6 out of 10

Eagle Eye was directed by D.J. Caruso, who also directed the movie Disturbia and several episodes of the tv show The Shield, so that explains some of the actors he decided to cast.  I say it was directed by him, but you’d never know a particular individual was behind it because for most of the movie the directing is completely stale and unnoticeable.  This doesn’t really hurt the movie, but it certainly doesn’t help it stand out either.  All of the actors deliver slightly above-average performances, with Shia standing out only because of greater amount of time on screen, but his performance is not strong enough to carry the film to the next level.  The writing of the movie is decent when it comes to dialogue, but the plot itself suffers from the typical flaws of a supposed mystery-thriller in that once the movie is over not everything rationalizes.  Events that occur in the very beginning of the movie are completely forgotten, never explained, and consequently really don’t make sense in the grand scheme of the film.

The characters manage to avoid being completely cliche, LaBeouf playing an under-motivated younger brother to the overachieving older brother who is loved but chastised by his parents and Monaghan playing a single mother who just wants to have fun and forget her troubles while taking care of her 5-year-old boy whose father can’t remember his birthday or afford child support.  The problem is not so much with the characters as it is with the movie itself: there isn’t a marginally original shot in the whole movie.  There are not-so-subtle nods to movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Minority Report, The Matrix, and Enemy of the State but Eagle Eye gets lost in the process and doesn’t manage to stand out as a movie of its own.

I went into the screening, having seen several previews for the movie, hoping to see an enjoyable and (possibly) original take on the modern day technological mystery-thriller. Unfortunately, all of the mystery is gone by half way through the movie.  It’s better this way in the end, because a lot of the unknowns in Eagle Eye are easily predictable, so waiting longer to be verified in your guesses would just make the experience worse.  There were several good ideas present in the development of the movie, but they all end up lost or undeveloped and traded in for a mainstream action movie with some minor elements of a thriller.  The movie never really dragged or stalled at any one point, so if you want to see a “light-hearted” action-thriller then you might really enjoy it.  For me, I wish the writers had read up more on stories by Phillip K. Dick and George Orwell and really turned their ideas into an excellent piece of cinema.