Few shortcomings take an audience out of a movie more effectively than ridiculous implausibility. If you could rank ridiculous implausibility, D.J. Caruso's Eagle Eye would give Kingdom of the Crystal Skull a serious run for 2008's top spot. The blame of this epic fail falls squarely on the shoulders of the premise, which pits U.S. National Security against an omniscient supercomputer (named Eagle Eye) that possesses the uncanny ability to dictate and direct every move in every second of every one's life. To buy into this premise, you're asked to believe every single form of technology is hardwired into an accessible mainframe, all of which can be hacked and controlled from a remote location. Yes, even your Atari 2600.Once the supercomp gets it's chip set rankled by Washington's chain of command, it does what all computers with jacked up AI do: it hops aboard the HAL express. OK, maybe on paper this doesn't sound that ridiculous, but once the life of protagonist Jerry Shaw (Shia LeBouf) is turned upside down, plausibility takes a back seat to elaborate action sequence after elaborate action sequence, where survival relies on blind luck, not skill. In order for the computer's sinister master plan to be executed to perfection, these impossible odds of survival have to be defied over and over again, throughout the entire movie. You're probably asking: if Eagle Eye boasts gigaflops of processing power, then how come it can't calculate something as pedestrian as probability? Shhhh...don't ask questions the writer's either haven't considered themselves or were hoping you'd be too stupid to come up with on your own.
What makes EE even less palatable than it's implausibility, are its ceaseless attempts to pass itself off as politically relevant, using the so-called War on Terror as its sinister back drop. By fanning the flames of fear, EE attempts to be taken seriously as not only a thrill ride, but as a political vehicle for current issues such as domestic spying, eroded civil liberties, wartime rules of engagement and so on. The makers of this movie must have gigantically swollen balls to hint at any credibility in the face of such overt ridiculousness.
In addition to it's insulting exploitation of hot-button topics, Caruso also throws everything he can at the screen, making EE excessively loud, flashy, fast paced and crammed to the clouds with gadget porn and faux tech. In all fairness, perhaps keeping the short attention spans of audiences piqued is the only way to keep them from noticing how ridiculously stupid your movie actually is. So if a computer generated voice calls you on your cell phone and insists you go to a theater to see Eagle Eye...tell them you're deceased and hang up. It works for telemarketers, hopefully it works for bad movies.
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