Par-annoy-a

Eagle Eye
Review by Nathan Weinbender

This has to be some kind of record. “Eagle Eye” marks the second film so far this year in which a bomb is set to detonate during a big concert attended by the President. The first movie to use this contrivance was “Get Smart,” and the explosion was to come as the final notes of “Ode to Joy” were played. Here, the Capitol Building will be destroyed when the symphony hits the high F near the end of national anthem.

In the case of “Get Smart,” the bomb was smuggled in the grand piano. In “Eagle Eye,” the bomb is hidden in the piping of an eighth grader’s trumpet. Can you guess which of these films was intended as a comedy? The answer, obviously, is the prior, but seriously? In the kid’s horn? That sounds like something right out of “The Naked Gun.”

That “Eagle Eye” is completely without a sense of humor certainly isn’t its main problem, although I suppose a little subversive wit may have distracted me from how muddled and frantic the script becomes. It is credited to four different writers, and it shows: This movie goes off in so many weird directions that, by the end, you’ll have forgotten what it originally intended to be about.

The opening scenes star Shia LaBeouf as twenty-something Jerry Shaw, who starts getting strange phone calls from a mysterious woman who gives him orders like, “The police are on their way—you have thirty seconds to evacuate.” Why are the police after Jerry? Well, they think he’s a national security threat, which likely stems from the fact that his apartment is filled with military-grade weapons and explosives.

Jerry honestly doesn’t know where the weapons are from—he came home, they were in his room, that strange woman is on the phone and the feds are beating down his door. The source of the explosives remains unknown, although it seems unlikely that anyone would deliver so much ammonium nitrate to a small apartment in the middle of the city.

Anyhow, through a series of complications too, well, complicated to detail, Jerry escapes from police custody. Following the detailed instructions from the female voice over the phone, he bumps into a woman named Rachel (Michelle Monaghan), who, good heavens, is also being given strange orders via cell phone. If she doesn’t do as the woman says, the train her son is traveling on will derail.

How could all of this be possible, you ask? How could a person, or even an isolated group of persons, control two peoples’ fates so effortlessly? I’m afraid I don’t have the answer—and I don’t think the movie does, either.

I do not know, for instance, how someone could program the film’s numerous high-speed car chases so that the bad guys’ vehicles are demolished and our heroes get away unscathed (they escape this movie with hardly a scratch, despite leaping from high places, being jostled down airport luggage chutes and encountering a runaway subway train and out-of-control junkyard equipment).

Or, for that matter, how anyone could know exactly where and when Jerry and Rachel will end up and what props—i.e. ID badges, guns, serums that slow their heart rates so their bodies require less oxygen, etc.—will be required of them. Even when it is revealed who (or, rather, what) has masterminded this series of events, it still doesn’t explain how such an operation could have been executed so seamlessly.

I know, I know, I’m not supposed to question. I know I’m not supposed to let logical suppositions even cross my mind. But the action sequences in “Eagle Eye,” which take up a majority of the running time, are deadening—one particular scene involving a speeding SUV and a military jet in a freeway tunnel is shot so murkily and edited to frenetically that it’s unintelligible—so I was given little else with which to entertain my brain.

If you happen to see the movie, my advice is to ignore the story and simply pay attention to how the script throws logic to the wind and beats common sense to a pulp. You’ll probably enjoy it more that way.

Steven Spielberg is listed as an executive producer for “Eagle Eye,” and there were sequences in this movie that reminded me of a particular moment in his sci-fi masterpiece “Minority Report.” Recall, if you will, the scene in that film in which Samantha Morton leads a wanted man, played by Tom Cruise, through a shopping mall being patrolled by the police.

She’s a clairvoyant and knows exactly when Cruise needs to duck, when he should stop and start, what direction he needs to travel in so that he’s always conveniently out of view. There’s more grace and excitement in that five-minute scene than there is in the entirety of “Eagle Eye.”

Grade: C

Directed by D.J. Caruso. Written by John Glenn, Travis Adam Wright, Hillary Seitz and Dan McDermott. Starring Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan, Billy Bob Thornton, Rosario Dawson, Michael Chiklis and Anthony Mackie. PG-13; 118m.