Column:

'Eagle Eye' good, not great

By Dan Moore

Published Sept. 29, 2008

At the beginning of the trailer for "Eagle Eye," a man enters his apartment to find it filled with stolen weapons. A woman calls him, calls him by name in a steady voice and tells him he has 30 seconds to get out before the FBI apprehends him. There's no voiceover, no dialogue - nothing to remove us from the character we've just met. It's a beautiful example of how to set up a wrong-man thriller, and it's a shame that the full movie didn't follow its lead. That's how things go with "Eagle Eye," a good movie that could have been a great one.

There's little to discuss, plot-wise, in a film that keeps so much to its chest, but the basics involve a shiftless 20-something named Jerry (Shia LaBeouf) who is set up by a mysterious voice and forced to do things that make him a federally wanted man. Eventually he meets a young single mother, Rachel (Michelle Monaghan), who's also under the voice's control - it has promised to derail the train her son is riding unless she does what she's told. They quickly learn that the voice, referred to only as "She," is able to manipulate the cell phones, cameras and power grids around them to make sure they stay in line, working toward a plan they don't understand.

That's all that can be divulged without unraveling the story completely. Suffice to say that if one is able to suspend disbelief on one crucial point, it all seems internally consistent. The execution, though, is worth mentioning. The film, unlike its trailer, just tells us too much. Obvious influences like Hitchcock's "North by Northwest" keep viewers as in the dark as their wrongly accused heroes, but "Eagle Eye" shoehorns a prologue, a blunt Middle Eastern set-piece, into the opening credits before we even meet Jerry and Rachel. The truly disorienting tone of the trailer is replaced by hazy, ill-fitting government overtones. When we finally get to the phone call, its power is sapped by the slow build of the opening scene.

Another problem crops up when there's action for the camera to follow. "Eagle Eye" sets up some imaginative, original set-pieces, including one at - and on - an airport baggage sorter, but Caruso is a member of that inexplicable fraternity of directors who think that people shake their heads violently when an action scene is set before them. Call it Bourne syndrome: Instead of watching these intricately choreographed scenes unfold, we have to fight the feeling of nausea through them, with cuts occurring seemingly at random. There's the feeling, throughout, that Caruso has bitten off more than he can chew.

The movie's saving grace, in addition to its concept, is its performances. Shia LaBeouf, in particular, continues to establish himself as this generation's William Powell, always trying to remain at an ironic distance but never quite able to do it. Whether he's bluffing in poker or attempting to pose as a White House security guard, Jerry's unable to be quite as smooth and detached as he'd like.

But the problem is not that this isn't a good movie - it's that it could've been so much better. One finds oneself looking at the trailer, and at producer Steven Spielberg, and thinking about what might have been.