Review of Eagle Eye (2008) by Chads. — 27 Sep 2008

[***SPOILER***] Dude sounds like a lady; the voice on the phone, Hal, reborn as a female super-computer(Halle), who keeps Jerry(Shia LeBeouf), then Rachel(Michelle Monaghan), alive, as "Eagle Eye", a live-action cartoon that borrows liberally from Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey, among others, updates the tradition of the person in peril who answers pay phones for pertinent information about his next move.

Back in the day, the hero would run from phone booth to phone booth to receive his directive from some guy who tracked his target without the benefit of a grid. He probably had a strong pair of binoculars.

That was old school. This is the new school, and for my money, "Eagle Eye" is just too chaotic for its own good. The thriller can be described as "The End of Violence"(Wim Wenders) meets "Shoot 'Em Up(Michael Davis).

Whatever social commentary about the Patriot Act this filmmaker proposes to make, gets upstaged, time after time, by overblown action set pieces, like a short attention span theater of the absurd. In a nutshell, "Eagle Eye" is George Orwell gone retarded.

This dystopia, an extrapolation on the intrustion that technology plays in our lives, hardly disturbs, just like how a video game is more of an outlet for visceral thrills than a means to provoke thought.

It's pure escapism, which is an irony of sorts, since there is no escape from the government these days.