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 In cinemas now [M]
Director: David J. Caruso
Runtime: 117mins
David J Caruso’s latest smash-’em-up blockbuster Eagle Eye opens with one of those US military screw-ups we’re lead to believe happen all the time: front-line troops are ordered by the Commander-in-Chief to launch a brutal strike on a funeral somewhere in one of the axes of evil. While there’s only a 51 per cent probability of the target being one of terrorism’s Mr Bigs– he only pokes his head up every few years – take him out now, or never. Collateral damage? Several dozen innocent mourners. So sets the stage for a massive conspiracy that draws in more innocents, and features an obscene bodycount… But there’s a message of course. It may be wielded by a blunt instrument in the ham-fist of Caruso, but it’s there, all the same.
Jerry Shaw – played by Shia LaBeouf, who also appeared in Caruso’s much more sophisticated Disturbia last year – is a twentysomething slacker who, for most of his adult life, has avoided the shadow of his much more successful identical twin Ethan. When his brother is killed in an accident, Jerry attends the funeral and returns to his shabby flat to find it filled with all the tools of the terrorist trade: small arms, night-vision goggles, and a significant quantity of ammonium nitrate. Within seconds a strange woman rings on his mobile and says he has moments before the FBI arrives. Across town, Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan) sees her son off on a school trip; later that night, as she hits the town with her girlfriends, Rachel receives a similar phone call from a mysterious woman: “Do as I say, or your son will die.”
Caruso isn’t covering any new territory here; Johnny Depp trod similar steps more than a decade ago in Nick Of Time, and Colin Farrell spent almost a whole movie trapped in a Phone Booth by a mysterious caller. But Caruso tries mixing it up with topical themes like terrorism, incursions into our privacy, and our fascination with and over-reliance on technology to make decisions for us. The annoying thing for those who like to dig a little deeper into films, is that Caruso’s little tale about the implications of the US Constitution is riddled with holes that make the overall plot irrelevant and extremely frustrating. For all his posturing about privacy and technology – and at times, Eagle Eye is shamelessly derivative, stealing plot devices from everyone from Kubrick to Hitchcock – Caruso lets the big bangs and flashes disarm the message to the point where I was wishing the conspiracy all went to plan. This is one for those who can live with just the bangs and booms.
**½
TIM MILFULL
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