Eagle Eye

Eagle Eye made me laugh so hard, I thought I might get kicked out of the theatre.  I openly mocked it right in front of itself, and if movies had feelings, Eagle Eye might have started to cry.  Here is a movie that must have been written by a fifth grader with a last minute revision by his military-obsessed father.  It is so patently ridiculous, with such gaps in logic you could fly any number of military aircraft through them.  You could stage all of the film's half a dozen multi-car pile-ups in these gaping holes, and they would never touch the sides.

I'm going to give a lot of the film's "secrets" away in this review, but don't worry about it, after ten minutes, or maybe after having seen the film's trailer, you will have figured all this out anyway.  I knew ahead of time what the big reveal was going to be;  I figured it couldn't be anything else, and I was right, and that just made it more fun to ... Well, to make fun of.

Eagle Eye begins with a military assassination gone wrong.  Through satellite imagery and the use of a spy plane the size of a kid's remote-controlled airplane, American military forces spot who they think is a top Lieutenant in Al-Qaeda.  The top brass is informed and asked if they want to go through with the assassination, which would involve bombing the entire area, even though there is only a 51% chance he is who they think he is, and even though it looks as if he is in the middle of a funeral.  If they're wrong, they would be breaking several rules in the Geneva Convention handbook.  They go for it, and incinerate the entire area.

Cut to Shia LaBeouf playing cards.  LaBeouf's character is named Jerry Shaw.  He is the fuck up of the family; Works at Copy Cabana, lives in a shitty apartment in Chicago, is 3 months behind on his rent, apparently never shaves.  He gets a call that his twin brother has died.  His twin brother, the success of the family.  Holds a solid job in Washington.  Always kept his nose clean.  Went to West Point, or Stanford, or whatever.

Now, if you've seen more than one thriller in your life, you'll know that whenever a character has a twin brother who has died, that character will be required to impersonate his brother at some time during the movie.  I don't know if Eagle Eye is aware of this, but I was.

Cut to funeral parlor, where everyone looks at Jerry as if they've seen a ghost, and he says, "I'm not him," and then walks up to his brother's coffin, collapses, and cries.  As if, what?, no one was aware they were twin brothers?  Cut to fight with father in twin brother's bedroom where we realize, as if we had to be told, that there is a divide in the family, and Jerry has not been close to them in several years, and that he dropped out of Stanford because that's not who he is, and he is trying to figure himself out while he works at Copy Cabana in Chicago.

This is ten minutes into the movie, and this is where it gets stupid.  Because Jerry goes back to his apartment, and his landlady says, "I had to let some people into your apartment because they had lots of deliveries for you," and then Jerry goes into his apartment and finds rocket launchers and machine guns, and chemicals used to fashion explosives, and then he gets a phone call from a mysterious, non-inflected female voice instructing him to get out, that the FBI will knock down his door and arrest him in 30 seconds.  And then the FBI knocks down his door and arrests him 30 seconds later.

Okay, so the landlady doesn't have a problem with a lot of beefy guys dragging metal crates full of rocket launchers into one of her tenant's apartments?  Or bags clearly marked "ammonium nitrate"?  I don't know, if I was a landlord, even an old Polish woman like this one, I think I'd tell them wait, he'll be home in a second.  But believe me, if you start picking this movie apart at this point, like I did, you'll feel like no one is listening to you by the end when you're shouting at the screen.

So let's get Michelle Monaghan into the mix, because she's really the only reason to see this movie.  She's the only reason to see the last three movies she's been in.  Cut to her rushing around her house, she can't find her car keys, her 9 year old son is a trumpet player and he's late for his train to Washington where he's set to play the National Anthem for the President and his Cabinet - you know, all the major power players in U.S. politics.  (Yeah, in a thriller, that means either she or the kid will be brainwashed or somehow made to be an assassin - whether it be through inadvertently housing an explosive, or what not.  Ever seen The Man Who Knew Too Much?  Watch it before you see this movie, then you can walk out before the climax, and beat the rush to the parking lot, because it's the same in both movies.)

Monaghan's character is named Rachel Holloman, and she's one of those single moms who lives in a great big house and leaves the keys to her SUV in the refrigerator.  She kisses her son good-bye and sends him off on the train, then goes out with her hot girlfriends and throws back a couple boilermakers and hits on every guy who walks by.  (Know any girls like this?  Give me their numbers, I'd like to hang out with them.)  Then she gets a call from that neutered female voice telling her she better go steal this Porche or her son's train will be derailed.  Well, Rachel does the last smart thing she'll ever do in this movie - she hangs up and calls the police.  But the call disconnects in mid-ring, and the female voice comes back 

on and says, "Don't screw up again.  We're watching you."

This is some Big Brother shit.  And if you've ever seen Enemy of the State or Spy Game, or read 1984 or Fahrenheit 451, or if you've ever watched an episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles then you will have guessed before the female voice starts turning lights green and opening electric doors, and timing Jerry and Rachel's every move to the nanosecond that this she is not a she, she is an it, and it is a giant super-mega-computer housed in the double secret 36th subbasement of the Pentagon.  Project Eagle Eye.  It's mission:  To be able to watch over everyone all the time, through surveillance and security cameras, through monitored cell phones, through radio waves, TV signals, and electric wires, through the vibration of a coffee cup.  Eye See You.

It's not much of a secret at all.  It doesn't pack much of a punch.  It's just kind of silly, like the rest of the film.  I mean, how could it be anything else when it can cause a construction crane to crash through a specific floor of an FBI building, and then control a side-scrolling digital sign across the street to tell Jerry to jump?  It's just lucky that FBI building is right next to an El track, and Jerry's just lucky he jumped when he did, and not one second later, or that train would have run him over.

Therein lies one of a googolplex of conundrums the four screenwriters never bothered, in their head rush to the next car crash, to figure out.  If the fucking computer can slow down the next train and back it up in order that poor Jerry get on it, then how come it didn't bother to stop the train that was about to run him over?  My answer, and your answer, too:  It wouldn't have been as thrilling that way.  Well, get ready to say that about every five seconds for the next hour.

I could go on and on and list some of my favorite stupid things this movie had its characters do.  Like having Jerry and Rachel (surely novices when it comes to crime) rob an armored car at gun point so they can get a briefcase they will later use once, for no real reason at all, and then dispose of.  Let's get into that, shall we?  First, the female voice tells them to approach the armored car.  They don't see it at first, because a Fed Ex truck is conveniently blocking their path.  (A nice little bit of product placement.)  Then, there it is.  So the voice tells them to rob the two guards who will come out of the building in 17 seconds.  (I guess Eagle Eye can not only see and hear you, but can predetermine how fast you turn a corner and walk down a hallway.)  How will we rob them?, Jerry asks.  So Eagle Eye pops open the rear door of the armored car, and sets off the airbag in the driver's seat to impede the driver.  Okay, so now armored cars have electric doors on them, and their airbags have some kind of satellite relay that can be triggered by remote.

Let's say this is the case.  Then, when Eagle Eye needs other cars to crash later on, why doesn't she set off their airbags to impede their drivers?  Oh, because it wouldn't be as thrilling that way.  It'd be much more thrilling to time the green lights so the protagonists shoot through the intersections unharmed and the FBI agents and cops in pursuit flip through the air forty times when they collide with cross traffic.  Or it'd be much more thrilling to lead our protagonists through a junkyard so that giant claw-like cranes can grab those cop cars and wad them up like paper, probably crushing their drivers into mulch.  (I would estimate at least 20 to 30 innocent lives are lost in this film.)

Eagle Eye is just amazing once it gets going.  I'm not talking about the movie, I'm talking about the computer.  Not only can it control green lights and claw cranes, but it can control barges in the water, military cargo planes, televisions at McDonald's, and at one point, it even causes an electrical transformer to explode so that a live wire can chase a man across the desert like a snake and zap him with so much juice, he literally explodes.  Now, why it leads Shia and Michelle to the desert to meet with this man (before he explodes) is your guess, because they could have easily met at the McDonald's or at Shia's apartment, or maybe at his brother's funeral.  I guess they just wanted to film something way out in the desert.  Kind of like how Hitchcock had Cary Grant go way out in the middle of nowhere in North by Northwest just so he could get swooped by a crop duster.

Hey, wait a second, that film was about a guy led into dangerous situations against his will.  An innocent man who seemingly had no reason to be made to do these things.  What the fuck?  That's two mentions of Hitchcock films here.  Eagle Eye doesn't deserve that comparison.  Wait a minute, Shia's last movie was a rip-off of Rear Window.  What's going on here?  He's nothing like Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart.  He's more like Don Johnson or Mickey Rourke.  Here's a kid who says in an interview that he's not gonna be that Hollywood asshole, then gets arrested for smoking a cigarette in Walgreens, then wrecks his car while drunk and fucks up his hand.  What a douchebag.

Back to the movie.

I would have loved to have been a writer on this film.  It's kind of like having a Get Out of Jail FREE card.  Most of the time in constructing a film, especially a balls-to-the-wall action film such as this one, you will write yourself into a corner on more than one occasion and have to back track and write yourself out of it.  The lucky four credited with writing Eagle Eye obviously wrote themselves into several corners, but when you have a seemingly omniscient, God-like presence like Eagle Eye, you don't have to back track, you can just do whatever you want and say she planned it out ahead of time.

Say, for instance, Shia and Michelle have just robbed an armored car at gunpoint and stolen a briefcase with a red digital readout on it so we, the viewer, will think it is a bomb, when it turns out to be just a briefcase with two syringes in it that they will then have to inject themselves with so they can take a nap while riding on that military cargo plane Eagle Eye flies all by herself.  So they're running down an alley pursued by heavily armed men with their briefcase in tow.  How do you get them out of there?  You just have a bus full of Korean tourists pull up, the doors open, and a very cordial lady leans out and goes, "Jerry, Rachel?  Come inside."  And they're out of there.

How did the lady on the bus know who they were and that they would be arriving on foot at the end of that alley with a briefcase that very second?  Cuz Eagle Eye called her on the phone and told her.  So does that mean Eagle Eye kidnapped her son as well?  Or framed her as some sort of terrorist?  Is her son on the same train as Rachel's son?

I asked this of all the people that, visibly under duress, assist Rachel and Jerry throughout the movie; who slip bombs into instruments, or mail packages, or make phone calls, or pick them up on random street corners exactly when they're told to.  Do all of these people have sons or daughters on the same train?  If so, they're doing their part for the environment in cutting down on carbon emissions through the use of mass transit.  Good for them.

Or maybe Eagle Eye is threatening to shut down the life support system of their comatose uncle.  Or turn off, via satellite feed, their grandmother's dialysis machine.  Maybe Eagle Eye has promised a very bad accident with their automated coffee pot.  Or threatened to electrocute their dog with the satellite relay option on his invisible leash.

Who knows what she could do with an Iphone.  At one point, when Jerry refuses to cooperate, she calls every cell phone in the train car with him and announces to all passengers that he is a terrorist and has a bomb strapped to him, and they don't seem to think anything of the fact that all their phones just rang at the same time and the same voice told them all the same thing.  This goddamn post-9/11 world we live in, we'll just believe anything anyone tells us on the phone.

Yeah, I really like these writers.  They push it to the edge.  They probably got paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to come up with this crap, and they basically got a free pass to put their characters in any kind of predicament they could come up with.  Just open a door for them or start a car or turn a light green.  Blow this up, flip that over, shoot him, and Spielberg will pick up the bill.  You've got this guy D.J. Caruso, the director, who is basically a mega-cut rate Michael Bay, which makes him a super-mega-cut rate Spielberg or Donner or Greengrass - any of those guys who would have looked at this and said, "I'll produce it because it'll make money, but I'd never get through it myself.  It's too silly.  I'd have too many questions."

I'd have never been able to write this.  It's not that I'm too smart, it's that I'm not dumb enough.  These guys could write themselves out of that hedge maze in The Shining, that's what kind of magical powers they have in this film.  They don't even have to think.  Just wake up in the morning, write 7 or 8 pages, stop for the day, then the next morning, just have some guy who's son is on a train open the door for Shia and hand him an envelope with a passport in it or whatever, and continue writing with your morning coffee right there next to you, and a cherry danish, or at least a bagel.

I would have gotten my friends in on this project, and we could have all taken writing credits with nice fat ampersands in between our names to show that we worked on it as a team, as a collective, as a co-op.  I would have brought writers in from Mad Magazine;  that would have explained the apparent oversights you would have to take into consideration if you are to seriously examine the finale.

I mentioned the twin brother cliche.  So Eagle Eye needs Shia to impersonate his twin brother in order to deactivate a security measure that is preventing Eagle Eye from going through with an assassination operation that would eliminate all the top brass in Washington, from the President of the United States on down to the Secretaries of this and that - all of whom are conveniently meeting in one room (where Michelle's son's jazz band is going to recite the Star-Spangled Banner, which will cause an explosive in the kid's trumpet to incinerate everything in a 50 yard diameter).

So why would it need someone who looked like the brother?  Wouldn't any security measure be deactivated by a fingerprint analyzer?  Or a retinal scan?  No, apparently down there in the super secret 36th subbasement of the Pentagon, they go by facial recognition scans.  So he looks enough like his brother, despite the recent welts and bruises and lacerations obtained as a result of multiple head-on accidents, to fool this scanner, and set into motion this assassination attempt.  Oh, there's also a voice-recognition test.  He passes that, too, despite the fact that no two people have the same voice pattern, not even identical twins.  Whatever.  At this point, whatever is a very minor form of criticism.  It was not enough to get the writers to stop or to get the director to not do the movie.  And LaBeouf doesn't care - he's out wrecking SUVs and fucking up his career.

You know, if Eagle Eye needed LaBeouf for his face, for that awkwardly handsome early-20's mug, why would she throw cars and trucks and trains and missiles at him?  Why would she have him inject himself with a drug that would give him a 92% chance of surviving?  What, with her split-nanosecond timing, you'd figure that other 8% wouldn't be worth it, and she'd just have someone kidnap Dwayne "Dog" Chapman's daughter, and have him go after LaBeouf and get him to Washington bound and gagged in the trunk of a Plymouth instead of killing all these innocent people and destroying all those pretty cars.