“Eagle Eye” is a techno-thriller that looks like “Minority Report” and the Jason Bourne movies. It starts with a high-tech sequence showing hoe the military is so advance in technology that they can track down a long wanted high-ranking terrorists suspect in the Middle East while attending a funeral. The top brass, though, can’t be 100% certain if it’s really the terrorist that they’re about to pulverize and has reservations about it, but the US President himself approves of the air strike and it subsequently kills innocent lives. This shows that security systems meant to protect ordinary Americans can also be used as tools against them because of anti-US reprisals.
The film then focuses on Jerry Shaw (Shia), an underachieving copy boy for a firm called Copy Cabana who has dropped out of Stanford and has become detached from his family. His life turned upside down overnight when his twin brother, Ethan, a soldier who’s smarter and more successful than him, dies after mysteriously being hit by a bus. His bank account suddenly registers $700,000 plus and boxes containing ammunitions were sent to the room he is renting.
He then becomes an innocent pawn in a dangerous game managed on his cellphone by a woman he has never met. The woman tells him to leave his apartment pronto but he refuses to listen, thinking there must be a mistake somewhere, so he gets arrested by the FBI and grilled by an investigator, Agent Tom Morgan (Billy Bob Thornton). The woman calls him again and then gets rescued in a daring sequence that ends with him perilously landing on the tracks of an incoming subway train.
The woman then instructs him to get into a car driven by Rachel (Michelle Monaghan), a young mother whose grade school son is performing in a concert for the US president and other dignitaries in Washington D.C. Rachel is also being manipulated by the woman who threatens to kill her son if she wouldn’t cooperate. From hereon, Jerry and Rachel have no choice but to comply to whatever the woman dictates them to do to an accomplish a mission they don’t even know about, with each situation they get thrown into increasingly become more dangerous than the previous one.
The film is presented as a thriller with political overtones and also a sci-fi story about advanced technology that goes haywire. The movie is dotted with various scenes showing dozens of cars being blown up or wrecked in spectacular crashes with eye-popping special effects. Well, this should not be surprising as this is a mega-budgeted flick produced by Steven Spielberg no less. In all fairness to Shia, Michelle and the rest of the cast, they are all pretty convincing in portraying their respective roles, but its movie’s script makes it more involving.
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