![]() ![]() That's rarely a good thing, and in this case, the many twists turn one too many times, ending up in the realm of the completely ludicrous. The problem is that, unlike Bay's so-easy-a-caveman-could-follow-it scripts, Eagle Eye was written by four screenwriters. Caruso channels his inner Michael Bay to fill this thriller with as many huge explosions as possible. All are notable actors, but their characters are two-dimensional stereotypes at best.ĭirector D.J. In addition to Thornton and Dawson, Michael Chiklis adds gravitas as the Secretary of Defense, and Anthony Mackie handsomely fills an Army uniform for the last third of the action. Meanwhile, the impressive supporting cast doesn't have much to do except look surprised and angry. He and Monaghan don't create sparks a la Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves in Speed, but they're likable enough as strangers literally thrown together who can't figure out what in the world is happening to them. ![]() Shia LaBeouf!" That's the perfect way to explain the curly haired leading man's "ordinary guy" charm. In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer says "I'm going for the Shia LaBeouf thing. If he doesn’t yet have the craft and clarity of a Cameron or his executive producer Spielberg, let alone Hitchcock, he’s getting there.There's often too much going on in this movie - though Shia LaBeouf definitely does his thing as the wise-cracking Jerry. Caruso keeps everything moving so quickly and with such panache that you will barely notice or care. It is when all these plot-twists start to coalesce that Eagle Eye’s ludicrousness becomes ever more apparent - but it’s a good kind of ludicrous. Suffice it to say, we get half-baked sub-plots involving Rosario Dawson’s Air Force investigator exploring the death of Shaw’s twin - Shia with neater hair - and an under-utilised Michael Chiklis as a Secretary Of Defense at the centre of a military fuck-up. To reveal much more is to quash Eagle Eye’s chief what-happens-next delight. Not playing second fiddle to huge machines or Indiana Jones, he finally earns his action-man stripes. From a bruising car chase down busy boulevards that segues into a breaker’s yard with cars being swung around like wrecking balls, to fisticuffs backstage at an airport, Caruso whisks his action into a spectacular but believable frenzy. After a summer packed with pixels, Caruso orchestrates his spills with a satisfying physicality you feel that stuntfolks are mostly doing this stuff in front of your very eyes. So it is a good job that Eagle Eye delivers practically non-stop action. Minus a lovely little scene in which Shaw quizzes Rachel about her kid, you get little in the way of characterisation. He’s saving his ‘cropduster’ moment for later. But Caruso has a different shock in store. And when the story delivers the pair into an open plain, it seems ripe for a Hitchcockian cropduster to hove into view. This is where the movie is most fun, with the anonymous woman on the end of the line turning the couple into unlikely hold-up artists, Japanese tourists and airport security crashers. Story, as out-of-control electronic signs, traffic lights changing at will and TV screens in McDonald’s mysteriously coerce and direct both him and Monaghan’s single mother on a wild goose chase with Billy Bob Thornton’s FBI blowhard in hot pursuit. He is pulled into a malevolent version of Steve Martin’s L. Trading on LaBeouf’s eminently likable mix of the charming and the resentful, his Jerry Shaw is a photocopy slave, good with the laydeez but estranged from his pop (Sadler). The result is a hugely enjoyable slice of nifty nonsense that revels in the pleasures of its plotting, and cleverly plays on everyday fears we all share: the fear of invasive technology, of terrorist cells, and of having William Sadler as your dad.Īs with 99.9 per cent of all thrillers, the set-up is more satisfying than its resolution. ’s Michelle Monaghan), building to a big climax at an American landmark. After 2007’s entertaining Rear Window reboot Disturbia, Eagle Eye is North By Northwest 2.0., with an EveryShia accused of a crime he didn’t commit, forced to go on the lam with a beautiful gal (M Caruso’s updating of Hitchcock classics using modern gadgetry, contemporary paranoia and Shia LaBeouf in for James Stewart/Cary Grant. ![]()
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