Eagle Eye (2008)

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

An engaging premise. You know the little voice that gives you driving directions from your GPS in the car? "Turn left in two hundred yards." "Approaching destination." Well, imagine that the little voice controls all the electronically transmitted orders to automated devices. I know it sounds terrifying but it needn't be all that bad. In this flick, Shia LaBeouf is astounded when his ATM shows a deposit of three quarters of a million dollars and spews it out into his hands and all over the Chicago sidewalk.Naturally, the beneficence of the little voice is an illusion, because its ends are to enable terrorists to take over the world, or destroy a city, or force everyone to listen to twelve-tone music, or something. The design is to force LaBeouf and his accomplice, Michelle Monaghan, to see that the terrorists get hold of a new explosive, so powerful that a chunk the size of a pinhead will -- I don't know, do things that are just plain distasteful. It enlists LaBeouf and Monaghan by saying in a cheerful voice through whatever device is available -- a cell phone, a traffic sign -- things like, "You have four seconds to exit the car before your baby is decapitated." That's what I call an imaginative premise and great things could have been done with it. But great things aren't done with it. It deteriorates in a few minutes into another novating action movie. The first high speed car chase takes place twenty minutes into the film. It seems to last forever. Never in the history of civilization has there been so much destruction wrought upon cars. They don't merely bump into one another, as at an amusement park, but they roll over ten times and disintegrate into thin slabs of metal mixed with mechanical junk. Cars are squashed by masses of scrap iron. They're picked up by automated cranes and dropped into Lake Michigan. The writers must hate cars.The human characters have far more endurance. They're practically superhuman. LaBeouf leaps out of a ten-story window, bounces off a tin roof far below, and lands on an I-beam over the subway tracks, and there's not a bruise on him. He's not even out of breath. And when he and Monaghan fling themselves into a mass of polluted water, we see them the next morning, and they look better than you and I do the next morning. After the dunking, the splashing, the swimming, the crawling out onto the mud, the hauling of themselves up onto the dock, Monaghan's hair is perfectly groomed. Her false eyelashes have stayed with her loyally throughout the ordeal.I couldn't watch the whole mess. I mean, there's a limit. Whatever happened to good solid Hollywood movies? Where did it all go? (Sob.)

Eagle Eye is a techno-thriller that is only half successful. The technology is present, but the thrills are undeniably absent. No amount of fancy-looking computers, chase scenes, and creepy voices from cell phones can make up for a soulless story.I was really excited about Eagle Eye when I saw the trailer for it last year, but for some reason I never went to the theatre to see it. I love Michelle Monaghan, and Shia LaBeouf seemed like he would be well- suited for this kind of movie. Well, now that I have seen it, I feel fortunate that I watched it in my own home for free instead of paying good money to be disappointed. How can a movie with this much action be, well, boring?The biggest problem with Eagle Eye is that the viewer is never given a reason to be invested in the story. You see Shia go to his brother's funeral at the very beginning of the movie, and then there is maybe two minutes dedicated to Michelle and her son. And then after that, we are supposed to be willing to accept that they would go through all of this for those reasons. It doesn't work. I was never convinced that I should care about what was happening. All the action in the world will not help a movie if it can not make that basic connection between the characters and the audience.As for the plot, it was so unoriginal and implausible that it warrants little mention. It certainly did not make the movie any more interesting. This kind of thing has been seen much too often, and I am a little surprised that the filmmakers would think that it would be sufficient. I will admit that a few of the set-pieces were cool, but there was nothing amazing or new. This could have been a made-for-TV movie with a much smaller budget and cheaper actors, and it would have been just as effective. It is not that Eagle Eye is bad, per se, it just doesn't offer anything to justify being made. Or bought.

Eagle Eye is a high tech concept thriller. Shia LaBeouf finds out that his identical twin brother has died. After the funeral he discovers money has been deposited in his account, bomb making material in his apartment and a mysterious woman phones him that the police are on their way to arrest him.Michelle Monaghan plays a single mom whose son is off to play a concert in Washington also receives a phone call from the same woman and she is also coerced to follow instructions or her son will be killed.The film is a preposterous techno thriller of a military supercomputer out of control which can dominate things not even on the grid including power lines (although technically that is on the grid!)Eagle Eye was at one time slated to be directed by Steven Spielberg and is inspired by an Isaac Asimov story. I guess Spielberg felt that the screenplay was never going to meet with his standards. Director DJ Caruso keeps at the film moving at a frenetic place so you never realise how implausible the film is. However there is little chemistry between Monaghan and LaBeouf and you get a feeling that many good actors are wasted.

Going to the cinema for thrills is a wonderful experience. Too bad those who saw "Eagle Eye" were devastated to learn they walked into a film that relates more to a comedy than a thriller. Coming back after "Transformers," Shia LaBeouf is teamed with the lovely Michelle Monaghan to star in one of the stupidest, lousiest, and most unbelievably dumb action movies in recent years. Jerry and Rachel are two strangers thrown together by a mysterious phone call from a woman they have never met. Threatening their lives and family, she pushes Jerry and Rachel into a series of increasingly dangerous situations, using technology to track and control their every move. At what point to poor Rachel and Jerry contact people for help? No! Director D.J. Caruso forces them to do almost everything an unnormal human being would intend on acting on. With Billy Bob Thorton as the bad guy, a random plane crash, weak explosions and every piece of dialogue being shouted, it's no wonder "Eagle Eye" remains an unloved and uin fact hated piece of scum. The horror of the quality from every level of storytelling by visual means and written means cannot compare to anything in the 21st century so far. This is laugh out-loud awfulness like you've never seen before. The only thing going for "Eagle Eye" is its intriguing title.