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Can You Surreptitiously Hear Me Now? | Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan get another spooky cellphone call in Eagle Eye.

EAGLE EYE
Directed by D.J. Caruso. Starring Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan, Rosario Dawson, Billy Bob Thornton. Now playing.
***

Eagle Eye is the kind of movie that makes you uncomfortable with the concept of a willing suspension of disbelief. If you think it’s believable, you have more fun with it. But it’s just implausible enough to play out like a Michael Crichton book on speed.

Jerry (Shia LaBeouf) is a bit of a slacker compared to his recently deceased twin brother, who did everything right according to the ’rents, and served his country too. The most Jerry serves his country is at the copy shop in which he works. So when Jerry suddenly finds $750,000 in his bank account and an apartment full of mysterious bombmaking equipment, he naturally freaks out. But not before a voice on his cellphone warns him that the FBI are honing in on him.

The next hour is a frenetic game of cat and mouse in which Jerry tries to avoid the authorities who don’t understand that they’ve just got the wrong guy, while omniscient messages pop up on his phone, nearby electronic signs, etc. telling him the best way to escape. Pretty soon pretty single mom Rachel (Michelle Monaghan) is along for the folie à deux.

Yes, it moves pretty fast. Yes, it’s fun to watch Jerry outpace FBI agent Billy Bob Thornton, and there’s a strange kind of Fugitive updating going on here. Yes, there are some fantastic chase scenes and great effects, if you don’t mind a little nausea from choppy camera movements.

But where Eagle Eye starts to get silly is when it starts explaining itself. The movie is a lot more fun when we’re in the same position as Jerry and Rachel, and we don’t know what the hell is going on.

In some ways Eagle Eye is a pretty smart thriller. It knows how to push our buttons in a post-9/11 world of increased surveillance and unwelcome intrusion into our lives. Do you know who might be listening in on your cellphone? Do you realize how your actions are being followed electronically?

Think about our lives from a bits-and-bytes perspective. Today I put gas in my car, got some lunch, went to the post office, bought some groceries, took and made tons of phone calls, surfed the web, sent and received e-mail, sent and received faxes, and worked on the computer. Pretty much all of my movements can be tracked. But by whom?

This is not the first movie to tackle these issues. Most recently, Spielberg’s Minority Report did a pretty decent job at jumping into the not-so-distant future. Eagle Eye is a high-concept movie, but it’ll be “science fiction” for only a short period of time, if at all.

Ultimately, it’s as hard for Jerry and Rachel to outrun the eagle eye trained on them as it is for us to relinquish our reliance on the computers that run our lives. Eagle Eye is a fun thriller that entertains for the first half, provokes for the middle, and gets to be a little too much in the end.

The scariest part of the film, frankly, comes during the closing credits, when everyone in the theatre turns their cellphones back on. Suckers.