Eagle Eye	by M. Faust

Considerably slicker and more exciting than the generic trailers make it look, Eagle Eye is a nifty thriller with an odd detail that I don’t think a lot of audiences are going to notice: The bad guys win. Or at the very least, they get off unpunished.

This is where I start to tread on thin ice, because I am ever cautious of the first law of movie reviewing—never, ever, ever give away important parts of the plot, unless you have to in order to make a really good joke. I don’t have a good joke, so I will limit any spoilers to the movie’s prologue, in which a president of the United States orders a counterterrorism operation to bomb a village in an imaginary Middle Eastern country. He does so against the advice of his defense secretary (Michael Chiklis), knowing that there is only a 50-50 chance that the top terrorist the operation is looking for is actually in the group; he would rather kill 30 innocent people at a funeral than take a chance on letting the guy get away. The bulk of the movie follows two ordinary people (Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan) who are “recruited” by a mysterious voice that speaks to them through cell phones and demands that they do its bidding. The voice has apparently omnipotent abilities to track and monitor them by controlling anything that is electronically operated, and while our heroes don’t know what’s going on, it’s not hard for us to guess that they’re being used in some sort of terrorist plot that will probably have to do with the aforementioned presidential war crime. I should point out here that said president is wholly generic, and that the action of the film takes place in late January 2009, by which time barring the imposition of martial law the White House will have a new occupant. Reminiscent of such technothrillers as The Net, WarGames, and even classics like Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and The Anderson Tapes, Eagle Eye for the most part lets you buy into its paranoid premise, or at least to overlook its implausibilities. Director D. J. Caruso keeps things moving at a swift, even pace, integrating exposition into the action rather than alternating overheated effects scenes with talky ones where the characters explain what’s going on. (Though let me warn you about one egregious use of fake tension: that suitcase that looks like a bomb? It’s not a bomb.) It takes movies a long time to get from the drawing board to the big screen, and I would guess that Eagle Eye was scheduled for the month before the presidential election on the assumption that national security would still have been uppermost in our minds. Even still, I can’t help but think that some viewers may find themselves wishing that the evil plot sketched out here had come a little closer to fruition, if only for the sake of a little movie fantasy.

—m. faust