Shia LaBeouf Can't Save Tepid Eagle Eye

Comments (0) By Robert Wilonsky Thursday, Oct 2 2008

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Starring Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan, Michael Chiklis, Billy Bob Thornton, and Rosario Dawson. Rated PG-13.

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Director D.J. Caruso fancies himself a hipster Hitchcock, with Shia LaBeouf as his snarky Jimmy Stewart. Last year the duo remade Rear Window and called it Disturbia; last week they returned with their North by Northwest/The Man Who Knew Too Much mashup, Eagle Eye, which is also flavored with overpowering dashes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Live Free or Die Hard, and The Parallax View. To offer up even the barest hint of plot synopsis would be fruitless for two reasons: It would take a week to untangle this convoluted tale — also starring Michelle Monaghan as a single mom, Michael Chiklis as the secretary of defense, Billy Bob Thornton as an FBI agent, and Rosario Dawson as an Air Force investigator — and you'd never believe it anyway. For grins: LaBeouf and Monaghan are two dupes in the wrong place at the wrong time wrangled into a plot to kill not only the president but also almost every other government official in the line of succession. By whom? Um ... HAL 9000. From tepid beginning to laughable middle to thudding end (and the final two minutes smack of a reshoot), it's nothing but a herky-jerky clusterfuck of noise and nonsense that scoffs at logic in order to justify its brainless treatise on American foreign policy, terrorism, and government surveillance. Big Brother is watching you, and he can't stop laughing his ass off.