Movie Night Review: "Eagle Eye"

I read the script for "Eagle Eye" a couple months ago and was surprisingly engaged by it... so much so that I had to see the movie. I'm glad I did because it's a window into the development process of any project. In some ways development came up with ways to solve the problems of the script and in other ways (more ways I think) they made it more confusing, leaving "Eagle Eye" a bit of a mess.

Let me say first of all that there are a couple of really cool action sequences in "Eagle Eye". There's Shia Lebeouf dangling from a suspended car in a wrecking yard, and then there's a great, nimble cat and mouse chase behind the scenes of an airport's luggage conveyor belt. Those two sequences deliver on genre well, and you can see why a director would be drawn to the material, but in many other aspects "Eagle Eye" is plain colorless.

At the center of "Eagle Eye" is Jerry Shaw, a copy boy at a copy shop who's never amounted to much but who, when his twin brother dies mysteriously, gets a call from a "voice" who forces him to carry out dangerous, criminal acts under the threat of death. Joining him on the insane ride is Rachel, the mother of a music student en route to Washington, who the "voice" has also singled out to be part of some larger plan.

Both Jerry and Rachel have no idea why they've been chosen and what they're being called on to do but the voice can track their every move, using technology to force them to bend to her will. It's a terrific expressionistic thriller concept. Problem is it has no second act. (One of the things that got annoying for me was that there were often no consequences to disobeying the "voice." She'd just sigh and say something along the lines of, guess I got to do this myself.)

Making things even tougher, the characters are all stock and their motivations aren't credible. Take Jerry. He's got no close family, friends, nothing really to live for and yet the "voice" is able to get him to go along with her plan. Like hubby said, as soon as he entered the apartment and he saw the ammonium nitrate sitting on his table, he would have been calling the cops. Seems strange that Jerry goes along. It's a leap of faith that is hard to buy.

In the script, there was the seed of an interesting reason that's been excised from the movie, which leaves Jerry's character all the more vague. And in cutting large parts of the subplot, the FBI folk seem like caricatures. Poor Anthony Mackie has nothing to do in this movie besides wear camouflage and rip out hard drives from the source of "the voice": the agency's massive surveillance A.I. known as ARIA.

Development did come up with a few better ideas in terms of how to execute clunky things in the script...a character's S.O.S. winking with his eyes becomes the rapid shutting on and off of a cell phone screen which fits in well with the movie's theme, and a saggy middle hotel scene where the action just stops to inject some romance and necessary exposition gets transposed to a Circuit City store with its giant projector screens. On the whole though, I'm not impressed by D.J. Caruso's depiction of an oppressive technology-saturated world. In this regard, I think he failed the script.

Couple this with some questionable casting (Michelle Monaghan is pretty vacant as Rachel and I love Rosario Dawson but had a hard time buying her as the tough-as-nails government appointee) and I'm convinced this movie could have been better executed. Still, as is, there are worst things to watch while munching on a bowl of popcorn.





"Eagle Eye" gets two and a half Oscars out of five.