Eagle Eye (2008) – Review

When your chickens come home to roost, you strike while the iron is hot, and after teen thriller Disturbia became something of a sleeper hit, director D.J. Caruso and a pre-publicist’s nightmare Shia LaBeouf reteamed again to move on from lovingly plagiarising Alfred Hitchcock and start riffing on Tony Scott instead. The result was Eagle Eye, a movie that attempted to bring the paranoia of Enemy Of The State into the social media generation by trying to up “big brother” aspect tenfold.
However, the result contained way too many car crashes and explosions to be the “tech is bad” wake up call the filmmakers we’re hoping for; but with a strange lurch into Terminator territory, the film still proved to be a nicely loud action romp that reminded us how convincing LaBeouf can be when he acts like the world is out to get him – oh wait…

Jerry Shaw has been willfully living his life as a spectacular drop-out, as he’s screwed up every opportunity he’s ever been given; however, a sizable reality check comes hurtling his way when he gets news that his overachieving, identical twin brother, Ethan, has been killed in a car crash. This proves to be the beginning of a living nightmare as Jerry’s starts to spectacularly unravel the moment that an ATM reveals that his formerly bereft bank account has suddenly expanded by $750,000 and it starts spitting cash at him much to his confusion. Worse yet, when he gets home to his apartment, he discovers that multiple deliveries have shown up which has made his abode look worryingly like a terrorist arms bizarre. As he freaks out at the bomb making equipment and various firearms piled in his living space, he gets a call from a strange woman warning him that the FBI is due to pounce at any minute and that she can guide him safely out.
However, while ignoring the voice probably proves that Jerry’s not much of a fan of The Matrix, he’s now in a substantial amount of trouble as Supervising Agent Tom Morgan and Air Force OSI Special Agent Zoe Perez are falling over each other to interrogate him. However, once again he’s bailed out by that mysterious voice on the phone, who guides him past various obstacles with impossible foresight.
Jerry is eventually led to housewife Rachel Holloman, who has been having some conspiracy issues of her own, as she too is at the mercy of that disembodied voice turning her life upside-down. With her son in peril, she joins forces with Jerry to try and achieve (and survive) every task the voice throws at them, but what is actually going on?
It seems that the secret lies with the death of Ethan and his job at the Pentagon, that not only concerns the Secretary Of Defence, but a top secret intelligence gathering experiment named ARIIA. Have Jerry and Rachel’s lives really plunged headlong into shitsville over a government computer glitch?

While opinion was originally divided about some of the decisions made by Eagle Eye’s script, there’s no denying that whether you love or hate the film, it’s certainly more prevalent now than it was is 2008. OK, so some of the twists edge closely into sci-fi territory as warnings about using AI to aid in national security start to feel more like Skynet than The Conversation, and some of the gargantuan action sequences that choose to fling around more cars than a John Landis marathon, tend to keep things fairly ridiculous. But while D.J. Caruso opts to keep things far fetched (for now), Eagle Eye manages to deliver enough smash and bang to cover for the fact that it’s about as subtle as trying to swat a fly with a pair of cymbals. Earlier on, I mentioned Tony Scott, who managed to corner the market in twitchy, postmodern, conspiracy thrillers thanks to slick editing and endless flashy shots of government monitors up to no good, and for best results, it’s probably wise to see Eagle Eye as the logical – if over stimulated – continuation of its themes.
Continuing his two-film series of making Shia LaBeouf progressively sweatier and more distraught, Caruso’s decision to leap from Rear Window update to full blown, nation-wide conspiracy flick makes a fair amount of logical sense. And if anyone earned their stripes from running and screaming while things blow up around them, it’s certainly LaBeouf thanks to the constant shit Michael Bay put him through during the Transformers movies. But much like Transformers, while LaBeouf’s angry-kid shtick seemed like a revelation back in 2007, it doesn’t actually translate so well when the actor is required to play more of an adult role butcwith the same, petulant screaming- such as in Transformers: Dark Of The Moon. In fact, while the film is supposed to act like some sort of redemption tale for a deliberate crash-out like Jerry, LaBeouf does such a good job realising the negative aspects of the character, it’s tough to actually feel much sympathy.

Similarly, while co-star Michelle Monaghan usually can infuse her roles with memorable charm (see Kiss Kiss Bang Bang for proof), again the continued waves of stressful events doesn’t give her character much room to breathe other than freaking out constantly about her imperiled son. Thankfully, the film has a sizable cast to take up the slack, such as Billy Bob Thornton’s federal cop, Rosario Dawson’s airforce agent, Michael Chiklis’ Defence Secretary and Anthony Mackie’s Pentagon key tapper, who weirdly all inject more charisma into the film than the busy leads get to do.
However, the real sticking point of the film proves to be the admittedly spirited action sequences and a late-stage twist that reveals the conspiracy essentially to be a complete ripoff of I, Robot.
Firstly, despite the fact that conspiracy thrillers usually tend to be more small-scale, intimate affairs, I feel I need to got to bat for Caruso’s string of preposterous chases. With an omnipotent force pulling impossible strings, the movie stages some truly bruising setpieces. Cars pile up by the dozen, a hijacked drone starts firing missiles in a tunnel and what appears to be countless innocents get seemingly shredded in the crossfire, but while the safety of Jerry may not stack up particularly well against the indiscriminate slaughter of onlookers, it’s still pretty impressive – if utterly silly.
However, it’s that techno-twist that’ll really test your thoughts on the film as the introduction of a super-intelligent AI going off the reservation feels both something of a cheat and awkwardly yanks the film into realms of sci-fi. It’s here that we realise that our point of reference shouldn’t have been The Parallax View, The Manchurian Candidate, or Enemy Of The State at all, but instead we should have been looking at films like Stealth, Virtuousity and Class Of 1999. Although I will say this, if you design your super-computer to look like the Event Horizon meets Vegas, maybe expect disaster…

Perfectly fun in a brutally heavy-handed sort of way, Eagle Eye seems to block its own progress when trying to amount to anything higher. Rock-em sock-em action diffuses the subtlety; the lack of likability of the main characters refuses empathy; and the introduction of an out of control AI causes any sense of realism to blink out of existence like a flicked out power switch. It’s certainly fun, but Eagle Eye has something of a blind spot when it comes to certain aspects of the point it’s trying to make.
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