“D” Rating by Robert W. Hammerle

“Eagle Eye” is to movies what Sarah Palin is to Presidential politics. Attractively packaged, both are entirely form over substance. Shallow and preposterous beyond words, it won’t be long before they are both relegated to the dustbin of history.

Since anyone interested in seeing “Eagle Eye” had probably seen it by the time I got around to flopping my dead butt into a theater at Trader’s Point, I don’t think that I risk giving anything away in this review. Comforted by that thought, let me just say that the computer serving as the villain in this forgettable action film (ARIA, voiced by Julianne Moore) makes you long for the day when HAL suffered a meltdown in Stanley Kubrick’s classic “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968).

While I normally would give you a synopsis of the plot, I can’t figure out how to do so without insulting everyone’s intelligence in the process. Suffice it to say that Shia LaBeouf plays a mirror image of the character he played in the far superior “Transformers” (2007).

Here, we see him as a pasty employee at a Kinko’s type company who suddenly finds himself arrested by the Government after his apartment is found to contain copious amounts of firearms and explosive materials. Thereafter, this idiotic film leaps from one outlandish scene to the next as we watch the perplexed Mr. LaBeouf and his principal co-star, Michelle Monaghan, follow directions given by a mysterious voice on their cell phones as well as various other computerized video billboards that conveniently appear along the way.

While the suspense is suppose to come from LaBeouf and Monaghan’s attempts to try and figure out what is going on, the sad fact is that it really doesn’t matter. The premise of this ridiculous exercise in filmmaking is as silly as its execution.

Relatively accomplished actors like Billy Bob Thornton and Michael Chiklis are wasted along the way as LaBeouf realizes that he is trying to save the Union from a rogue government computer. By the time of its sappy maudlin ending, I doubt that anyone who has a GED or above will remotely care what happens to anyone.

The only mildly positive thing to say about this movie is that the special effects are, for the most part, first rate. However, even they become repetitive, and they can’t hide the undeniable fact that “Eagle Eye” is a cinematic throwaway by any definition. Quite frankly, it is a reminder of the old American slogan that “No one has ever gone broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”

“Eagle Eye” is a lightweight video game posing as a movie exactly in the same way that Ms. Palin is posing as a Vice Presidential Candidate. However, while there is nothing remotely scary about “Eagle Eye,” Palin, as incredibly unqualified as she is, stands on the praecipe of being one heartbeat away from the Presidency, that heartbeat ticking in the body of a 72 year old man with a history of a virulent form of cancer. That’s just not scary, it is a real life horror story.