Eagle Eye (Single Disc Widescreen) (2008)

ReelViews 5 of 10
Eagle Eye has all the earmarks of a once substantive script that was poked, prodded, cut, and crimped until all semblance of intelligence was wrung out of it. It's still possible to see the cautionary message underlying the movie: something about the danger of Big Brother and the result of giving computers too much control. The former was more than adequately explored by George Orwell. The latter has formed the fulcrum of countless science fiction stories, including Star Trek episodes, 2001, and this year's best animated feature, WALL*E. It feels almost unclean to write a review for something as bad as Eagle Eye and include those fine titles...It would be nice to see Shia LaBeouf appear in a movie that gives him a chance to act. Lately, all he has been doing is standing around playing a foreground ornament to a bunch of special effects...The average positive review of this film will remark that "it's a fun ride if you turn off your brain." I'm not sure why anyone would want to turn off their brain, since that's the organ where the body's pleasure centers are located. Even granting that, when it comes to dumb popcorn movies, Eagle Eye is nowhere near the top. What makes the film even more disappointing is its veneer of social commentary about nonstop surveillance and the omnipotence of computers. These things are red herrings that, like Caruso's frantically edited chase scenes, are designed to camouflage the bankruptcy of the writing. Should this film be a huge box office success, it will stand as a sad testament to how low the bar for cinematic entertainment has been set. - James Berardinelli
 
Chicago Sun-Times 6 of 10
The word preposterous is too moderate to describe "Eagle Eye." This film contains not a single plausible moment after the opening sequence, and that's borderline. It's not an assault on intelligence. It's an assault on consciousness. I know, I know, I liked "Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor," but that film intended to be absurd. "Eagle Eye" has real cars and buildings and trains and CNN and stuff, and purports to take place in the real world...You might like it, actually. Lots of people will. It involves relentless action: chases involving planes, trains, automobiles, buses. Hundreds of dead. Enough crashes to stock a junkyard. Lots of stuff being blowed up real good. Two heroes who lack any experience with violence but somehow manage to stick up an armored car at gunpoint, walk on board an unguarded military transport plane and penetrate to the ultra-secret 29th-floor basement of the Pentagon...If you're looking for a narrative that makes much sense, "Eagle Eye" lacks one. It's essentially a lot of CGI and stunt work, all stuck together in a row. LaBeouf is a good young actor, but you wouldn't discover that here. I barely had time to observe that he resembles an underweight John Cusack when he was off and running, as Jerry and Rachel became elements in effect scenes. The movie obviously intends to resemble and inspire a video game, and at that it is slick. I look forward to film students using their clickers to work out the average shot length. I'm predicting less than three seconds. So to summarize, "Eagle Eye" is great at all the things I object to, and I admit it. But I didn't enjoy it. - Roger Ebert