‘EAGLE Eye” is a fu turistic cautionary tale about the abuse of high tech nology. Did you re alize, for instance, that right now, in the US of A, gizmos make it possible to write a script while flicking from “Enemy of the State” to “North by Northwest” to “2001”?
With its array of chases and shootouts and a sinister political plot, the movie at least holds your attention and keeps things brisk-ish. But every scene still bears the tags of the place from which it was stolen.
Shia LaBeouf – who announces that he is a grown-up leading man by wearing one of those starter beards that you remember on the skeeviest guys of sophomore year – plays Jerry. Jerry’s an underachiever who comes home one day to find his apartment filled with automatic weapons, timing devices and fertilizer. These things are also the building blocks of the screenplay.
An all-powerful force, personified in an antiseptic female telephone voice that keeps calling Jerry to tell him when to jump and how high, contrives to get him both arrested and freed. (So why not skip the arrest?)
The voice can also, with unerring accuracy and impeccable timing, control traffic lights to create car pileups, flash Jerry advice on electronic street signs and arrange for cranes to crash through windows. Obviously, this thing doesn’t run on Windows.
One victim is a mom (Michelle Monaghan) whom the voice orders to rendezvous with Jerry and provide opportunities for bland dialogue. After the pair have nearly had their molecules ripped apart about eight different ways, instead of asking each other pertinent questions such as, “Who is out to get us?” they instead engage in forced “character development.”
The script comes from the ubiquitous “creative visionaries,” as the press notes call them, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, who also provided us with scripts for “Transformers” and its forthcoming sequel. They also wrote “Mission: Impossible III,” the new show “Fringe” and December’s forthcoming “Star Trek” film.
Are they being stretched thin? There are lots of new wrinkles to ponder about American surveillance, but it seems that all the writers have surveilled is HBO.
They haven’t quite worked out that the point of the Jason Bourne movies is the cunning details of how Bourne wiggles through the net; this time all the gadgets are working to keep the heroes alive. That means they’re as passive as pingpong balls-except when the voice forces them to get creative, at which point the heroes become active, but ridiculous.
As for “North by Northwest,” which is alluded to in an otherwise inexplicable scene (the two leads pop up in the sticks for no reason), it offered a sharpness of lapels and wit. This movie gives us an array of lines like, “She could derail a train. She could probably turn it into a talking duck.”
There isn’t even a hint of romance, possibly because the leads are so age-
mismatched that things would turn into the Mary Kay Letourneau story.
Even that wouldn’t be as weird as this movie’s contention that, in order to invade the core of America’s political structure, all you need to do is flash somebody else’s ID, beat up the only policeman in sight and steal his uniform.
EAGLE EYE
Enema of the state.
Running time: 118 minutes. Rated PG-13 (profanity, violence). At the Lincoln Square, the Orpheum, the Kips Bay, others.