Movie Review: Eagle Eye

Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan play Jerry Shaw and Rachel Holloman, two complete strangers that get thrown together in a life or death struggle against a seemingly Omnipotent, omnipresent organization.

The movie opens with Michael Chiklis as the Secretary of State in a war room with military advisers tracking a suspected terrorist in the M.E.. As the group tries to get a positive ID a monitor flashes a 51% probability and a negative launch but the POTUS super cedes the analysis and the attack is authorized.

Meanwhile across the earth Jerry Shaw is playing cards with his friends at work at the copy store, elsewhere Rachel Holloman is getting her son ready to go on the train to Washington DC to play in his schools chorus.

They are about to have the most insane day of they're life...

Jerry and Rachel are two very common people in today's society, a young man struggling to earn an honest living, and a single mother struggling to raise a son.

After receiving the terrible news that his twin brother just died Jerry finds his apartment packed to the gills with weapons, passports and canisters of explosive materials, shortly after Jerry receives a call from a women who tells him he has 15 seconds to flee his apartment before the FBI arrive.

Elsewhere Rachel struggles to find her car keys to drive her son to the train station since her ex hadn't arrived to pick him up. After bringing him to the train and seeing him off she meets up with some girlfriends at a bar when she receives a call from the same mysterious woman, she instructs Rachel to go to a car around the corner and await further instructions if she wants her son to live.

After being interrogated by the FBI investigator Morgan (B.B.Thorton) Jerry gets his phone call but his call is cut off by the mysterious woman who assists in his escape, he begrudgedly follows her orders and ends up with Rachel. The two strangers soon end up on the FBI's most wanted as they make their way from one rendezvous spot to another per the voice on the phone's instructions. Along their journey they discover they are not the only ones being manipulated by the woman on the phone.
About three quarters of the into Eagle Eye we learn who the voice is and yet the tension never lets up, the audience may know who the puppet master is but we still don't know it's motives. Once we realize what operation guillotine is we are in a whole new race along with Jerry Shaw and in typical Hollywood fashion there's literally milliseconds remaining to save the day! But rest assured the bad gAI's are thwarted and the hero saves the day and everyone lives happily ever after.
I enjoyed the movie, Shia impressed me in Disturbia and Transformers, he and Michelle Monaghan do a great job portraying ordinary, everyday people plucked out of their normalcy and placed liked pawns into an extraordinary situation that at times seems far fetched and at other times probable. Billy Bob Thorton seems almost typecast as the a government employee, be it Nasa, CIA or FBI, that's his comfort zone so he fits the role of an FBI agent well, Rosario Dawson does a great job as Navy Officer Zoe, if she looks familiar she starred in Clerks 2...totally different character from Eagle Eye so she's got acting range!
Once the movie reveals who the voice is some technophobes may sigh, but it's not uncharted waters for Hollywood, other movies that share the genre would be 2001 A Space Odyssey, Live free or Die Hard and Macross Plus.
Some reviews I've read say this movie diggs at the Bush administration by the fact that the POTUS ignores data on a threat assessment and the repercussions trickle down to the common US citizen, interesting thought, perhaps D.J. Caruso did intend that but I'll leave that up to you to decide.
Eagle Eye is a good movie that keeps you guessing even after the "big reveal", it'll have some technophobes pulling their batteries out of their cell phones and wondering if big brother is watching their every online purchase and blog post....
*waves to the web cam ;)
B