Eagle Eye

Eagle Eye (2008)


Director: D.J. Caruso
Writer: John Glenn, Travis Wright, Hillary Seitz, Dan McDermott
Starring: Shia the Beef, Michelle Monaghan, The Commish, Billy Bong Thornton, Rosario Dawson, and shia the beef

Synopsis
Mysterious female voice engineers (or represents the engineers of) circumstances which cause two plebes to get in a bunch of trouble as they do things for this organization.  Billy Bob and Rosario Dawson are whatever kinds of law enforcers who are investigating all this nonsense, because this group gave Beef a bunch of money and weapons and fertilizer to make him look like a terrorist.  Extremely convoluted hijinks continue to ensue.  But (in the words of my woman, spoiler alert!) everything is fine in the end.


The Woman
this movie totally rocked. if you look past the minor issues like the plot, and the technology based on the plot, and the throw away beginning. i love watching crap like this. it's just the right amount of "no intelligence required" because if you think too hard...well just don't think too hard. seriously though, the whole background of the beef being a copymax sales associate is entirely unimportant, and could have easily been cut out to make the movie a half an hour shorter. the funeral and interactions with his family? maaaah. cut it. there could have just been a line or two of how he is the "lazy not living to his full potential twin" and the audience this movie was intended for would have got the gist. another slight criticism i have, is the action sequences were a little long and confusing. especially the car chase one. i had no idea what the heck was happening with the exterior shots.

  after two days of intensely baking little pie tartlets, this was exactly the tall drink of stupid i needed. wait. why did the computer set him up to be a terrorist? that only put the feds on his trail, which eventually undid the entire plan of "operation guillotine". if the computer a.k.a. skynet just needed the beef's "bio trace?" why didn't it just send him to d.c. why did he have to join michelle monghan and her quest? did the computer know they would have good chemistry and work well together? is the computer just eharmony in disguise? i've started to ask questions...damnit.


MOster
Holy fuck, do I not know where to begin.  There is nothing original in this movie except possibly for Beef's facial hair, and that's just a crime against humanity.  After an opening UAV assassination, two EXTREMELY long character introduction sequences, one of which is standard divorced woman sending her son on a field trip and the other of which is loser-type son mourning for his much better-accomplished twin brother (that twin part is important. Pay attention!) bring us to some meat right around the 30-minute mark.  The meat, however, is rotten: We're subjected to a series of derivative setpieces which steal from movies such as "The Matrix," the "2001" and "Terminator" series, and "Wanted."  Many of these are shot quite poorly and none of them are plausible in the least.

The plot centers around these two people having to do all these things because this mysterious voice tells them to and threatens them and their families with certain doom.  As the story unfolds, we find more people are being manipulated by the same voice.  Of course, we're three steps ahead of the characters in figuring the whole thing out; and when we finally meet this HAL-type supercomputer which has taken things into its own hands the reveal is just underwhelming.  The closing action sequence has Beef shooting a gun during the State of the Union Address... and living.

There are a couple of bright spots.  Billy Bong has some good lines... well, more than two anyway, so that counts as a couple.  I guess the acting is OK, but it's so hard to judge because there really is so little for them to use.  The physical elements of the effects are fine.  And the editing is largely OK.  But none of that has a chance to add up to anything against such an incredibly large deficit of writing and direction credits.

From the first frame of the movie the music is so stock as to be a parody.  To the last frame of the movie the plot is a mosaic of fair to middling to good which resolves into a photograph of feces.