Matt's Movie Blog

Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Eagle Eye

Stupid movies have carved out a nice little niche in America. They cost little, they do well, and they are often forgotten shortly after audiences leave the auditorium. The problem is that those tend to be comedies. Eagle Eye is not a comedy. But boy, is it ever stupid. On the bright side, it could be a lot worse.

I don't want to give the wrong idea. I enjoyed the heck out of Eagle Eye. While I was watching it, it was a damn good movie... most of the time. Occasionally, I would have a flash of realization that something I was seeing onscreen was completely absurd, ridiculous, misguided, paranoid or just plain idiotic. But then something would blow up REALLY BIG, and I would be sucked back in. In that way, I think the movie does exactly what it was designed to do – it's escapism at every possible level. But the way the plot is written, there may be people out there (re: stupid people) who try to see it as more than it is. If you fail to categorize the twist as absolutely moronic, then we have a problem.

Now, I can't go into what that twist is, really. In fact, giving away anything about the plot beyond what is shown in trailers and advertisements would be unfair. To start, we have two seemingly unconnected stories. The first is Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf), a super slacker working at a Chicago copy center in between hands of a nightly poker game. Jerry's life kind of sucks – crappy job, crappy apartment, no savings to speak of – but early on you get the impression that if he wanted to, he could move beyond that life. There must be something attractive about it. Tragedy hits Jerry's family, which reveals a lot about the choices he's made, and upon returning home for the night, he finds his crappy apartment stuffed to the gills with weaponry, explosives, and classified intelligence. His cell phone rings, and a woman gives him instructions to run. He doesn't, he gets arrested, the woman calls again and helps him escape... we've all seen this clip in the trailer.

The second story is about Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan). We meet her as she is bringing her son Sam to a train station in Chicago for a trip with his school band to Washington, D.C. Naturally, she's nervous, and her deadbeat ex-husband's presence doesn't help anything. Luckily, we don't see him again. After putting Sam on the train, her cell rings, and the same woman threatens her son. Rachel complies, ending up driving the car the picks up the escaping Jerry Shaw. From there, they are on the run together, completing assignments from the mystery woman without really knowing what the end game is.

It's about at this point that the movie turns deeply stupid. In the opening segment, we met Secretary of Defense Callister (Michael Chiklis), and his story is the one that reveals the mysterious woman to us. And it's deeply, painfully idiotic. I caught it about half an hour prior to the reveal, and I quietly swore that if it turned out to be true (which it was), I might leave the theater. I didn't. After the movie ended, I started talking about it with my girlfriend, and we picked it clean before we got to the restaurant down the street for dinner. Particularly involving the mystery woman's methods of getting Jerry and Rachel to where she needs them to be, there are leaps of logic over gaps so vast that they almost come off as clever at first, since there's no way in hell that YOU would have thought of doing things this way. But after a quick discussion, you'll quickly figure out that the reason you wouldn't have thought of it is because it's a damn stupid idea. This became a pretty common theme in our post-movie chat.

Read the rest at HBS

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