Eagle Eye (2008)

"Jerry Shaw, you have been activated. Your compliance is vital."


The action-thriller genre is, in my opinion, a tired and overused genre of film that is all to easy to produce in the modern era and takes something really special, like The Matrix, in order to stand out. Year upon year these instantly forgettable, heavy on C.G.I. action-thrillers are churned out by distinctly average directors and they go on to be instant summer blockbusters. Eagle Eye, directed by D.J. Caruso ("rehasher" of the Hitchcock classic Rear Window), was the latest in this long line to be added straight to the rubbish pile.

Jerry Shaw (played by Shia LaBeouf) is a young man who displays high intelligence but ultimately lacks focus in his life and is in financial trouble. Upon the double discovery that one, $751,000 has been deposited in his bank account and two, a large amount of military weapons and forged documents have been delivered to his flat, Jerry receives a phone call from a mystery woman who claims that the F.B.I are about to apprehend him. He doesn't believe her but she proves to be correct and the F.B.I do indeed apprehend him. He continues to receive phone calls from the woman who helps him escape custody. Jerry eventually meets Rachel (Michelle Monaghan) who has been receiving similar phone calls. The pair continue to receives the calls and the woman continues to help Jerry and Rachel evade the continuous efforts from the Chicago Police to capture the pair.

Plenty more happens from this point but in truth it is all irrelevant. Midway through the film, up to the point at which my plot summary ceases, I was shaking my head in disbelief at what Caruso was attempting to get away with and what he was expecting us to accept as real. As a plot, Eagle Eye is incredibly implausible. 'Why, there have been many implausible films, many of them classics,' I hear you say. And you would be true in saying that, but the problem that Eagle Eye presents is that it doesn't think of itself as implausible. The story unfolds in the real world, the stuff in the film is real stuff; real news channels, real cars and real modes of public transport. Implausibility is unintentional yet the whole first half in which we are expected to believe that this woman, (who actually turns out to be a 'supercomputer'), can control every security camera, L.E.D display screen, traffic light in Chicago, can monitor every mobile phone of every citizen, can observe all the traffic on the busy city streets and can even control the exact movements of cranes in scrap yards, is precisely that...totally implausible.

Further implausibilities include Jerry and Rachel's sudden ability to achieve things that even Jack Bauer would struggle to get away with. They manage to hold up an armoured van with incredible success, they manage to sneak on and off an aeroplane that one would assume had a high military guarded presence and then they have the audacity to attempt to, and unsurprisingly yet amazingly, sneak into the Pentagon! Yet Jerry and Rachel are, in truth, your everyday Joe Bloggs not super stealthy agents. Just how do they do it..incredible!

This is not my only issue. Everything in this first half of the film feels incredibly timely. For instance, there was a moment in which Jerry falls onto a train track and seconds later a train appears whizzing towards him at high speed so that he has to quickly recover from his fall in order to avoid certain death. Also, when they are sneaking off the cargo plane after it has landed, they obviously don't really know where they are going. Fortunately for the pair there is an emergency exit map right in front of them. How handy! This timely nature of events occurs simply to fabricate suspense creating a computer-game-like atmosphere, which is as far from reality as you can get.


The sad thing is a lot of people will enjoy this. It certainly looks slick and it has an electric pace to keep even the most inattentive of people alert and on the edge of their seats. It is filled with explosion after explosion, after explosion, after explosion, after explosion, chase scene, after chase scene, after chase scene, C.G.I. overload if you will, and for a large proportion of folk this is all good. But for me it is incredibly unoriginal and pretty dull.

Overall, Eagle Eye is a train wreck of a film. Sure, the special effects here are great and the film is incredibly intense, so intense that I half expected to be holding my X-Box 360 controller in my hands when I looked down at them whilst watching Eagle Eye. Trouble is, when I did look down at them and saw no controller in my hands, the film becomes impossible to enjoy. Shia LaBeouf, supposedly one of the brightest young actors around, produces an all too familiar 'Shia LaBeouf role' which happens to be a distinctly average one. The film is an insult to our intelligence as human beings which just reels off implausibility after implausibility until it's conclusion, which happens to be the all too familiar unnecessary love scene moment. After only just meeting, in a rather peculiar scenario, with little time to get to know each other before the next implausible attempt to evade capture is imminent, it seems that actually they really quite like each other. Bleurgh.

Rating: 2/10 - Terrible.