Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
"Eagle Eye" is basically Shia LaBeouf running down one busy street after another with an intelligent woman in tow. They run, they hide, they drive, they run again and hide. All this time a female computer-generated voice is calling Shia's cell phone repeatedly, telling him where to go and where to be. If he doesn't answer his phone, the voice sends messages through visual bulletin boards or on highway signs, etc. "RUN" or "GO TO GATE 17" - you know, basic commands from the old days of BASIC computer language.
How is this happening? The computer voice yields from a new surveillance system straight from the Pentagon that has gone haywire. How haywire? It not only deposits money in Shia's bank account to the tune of 750,000 dollars, in addition to sending him tons of guns and bombs in his apartment which he never gets to use, it also wants to assassinate top officials in the government starting with The President of the U.S. Now if this computer has such top-notch surveillance across all 50 states and can even kill someone by somehow cutting live power lines (!) then why does it need Shia or a poor, single mother (Michelle Monaghan) at all when it can accomplish its own dastardly methods?
This supercomputer is known as ARIIA and it is the most evil computer since HAL 9000 yet not the most challenging - how exactly did this evil technology suddenly became automated is not clear. While watching the movie's hyperkinetic Hitchcockian turns courtesy of director D.J. Caruso (who helmed the underwhelming "Disturbia," a knock-off of "Rear Window"), "Eagle Eye" is run-of-the-mill running and jumping and copious car-crashes that are at best generic with not enough of a visual eye. Headache-inducing with whirlwind use of hand-held camera moves and Michael Bay millisecond cuts, "Eagle Eye" is never believable and feels like a more high-tech version of "Enemy of the State" though any stimulating questions about government surveillance are zapped by the movie's falsely urgent explosive action scenes. You might get exhausted by the end but you'll come up empty.
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