The Cinema of the Four

Eagle Eye

I was reviewing a file from a long-cold cinematic investigation of “The Goonies” during breakfast on the morning that I was summoned to look into a more recent puzzle forgettably called “Eagle Eye.” In an early scene in “Goonies,” the two Coreys set a very complex Rube Goldberg device into motion just to open the front gate and let their friend Chunk into the yard. I would have cause to reflect upon that device much later in the day as the events of “Eagle Eye” played themselves out.

If should come as no shock (or “spoiler”) to anyone who has seen a preview of “Eagle Eye” to learn that the movie is about people being run through our techno-maze of a world like test rats by an artificial intelligience who speaks to them via cell phones, lit signs, televisions, etc. It is “Terminal Velocity with an agenda, Skynet with a Patriot Act spin. Any technology that can be accessed remotely becomes just one more arm of the mysterious brain whose motives for building a giant Rube Goldberg device around two ordinary people eventually become clear. There is plenty of movement and sudden turns, keeping an adult mind engaged in the same way that shaking a rattle in front of a baby does, but beyond that?

Nothing. The characters are either unlikable (Shia LaBeouf’s rebel slacker of a twin) or dull and unremarkable (Michell Monaghan’s maternally concerned eye candy). Michael Chiklis, Billy Bob Thornton, and Rosario Dawson are always fun to watch, but one wishes that, like the leads, they were given something a little more interesting to do than muse about the mysterious happenings between fits of running and shouting.

Like watching an old “Mousetrap” game run through its mechanics, “Eagle Eye” is vaguely interesting. But when it’s done, you really don’t give the mouse a second thought.

What Great-grandfather Sherlock might have said:
“I knew Von Herder, the blind German mechanic, who constructed it to the order of the late Professor Moriarty.”