"Eagle Eye" never takes flight

Shia LaBeouf, star of the new thriller "Eagle Eye," has been getting around lately.

He has been on magazine covers, hosted teen award shows and, since graduating from Disney star status in "Even Stevens," he has wasted no time in establishing himself in Hollywood. First, it was "Disturbia," a thriller last spring, followed soon by last summer's smash hit "Transformers." This year, he has ridden alongside Harrison Ford in the blockbuster "Indiana Jones: Kingdom of The Crystal Skull," and now stars in the box office's current number one movie, "Eagle Eye."

So why is he so popular? Well, first of all, he is a fine actor. Not a fine actor like Jeremy Irons or Kevin Kline, who will make you feel like you've accidentally walked into a Broadway auditorium; but a fine actor like a young John Cusack or Samuel L. Jackson: a decent performer who always seems right at home on screen.

LaBeouf also seems to be a filmmaker favorite, working under Steven Spielberg, who produced "Disturbia," "Transformers," and "Eagle Eye," and produced and directed "Indiana Jones: Kingdom of The Crystal Skull." LaBeouf has also been paired up with director D.J. Caruso twice, first in "Disturbia" and now in "Eagle Eye."

Caruso was a good choice to helm "Eagle Eye." He is a solid director who specializes in thrillers, from his strange and kind of great neo-noir "The Salton Sea" to the bigger-budgeted, smaller-hearted "Taking Lives." Caruso does a good job with the political paranoia and kinetic action and violence in "Eagle Eye."

The plot is fairly simple. Jerry Shaw (LaBeouf) is an unmotivated young man working a dead-end job in Chicago.

One day he can't pay rent and the next day he is shocked to find $750,000 in his bank account. Upon returning to his apartment he finds it filled with suspicious items: guns, bomb-making materials, Air Force operational manuals, etc. He soon receives a strange phone call informing him that the F.B.I. will arrest him. They do.

Simultaneously, a similarly prescient call is received by divorced mother Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan), who is told to steal a car and wait in a parking garage.

Before long, our two equally baffled main characters are in the same car on the run together and receiving the same strange phone calls telling them what to do.

The mysterious voice on the phone seems to wield endless control over various technological functions, adjusting traffic lights, television screens, and power lines, as it guides and threatens our two heroes.

Things move at a breakneck pace, thanks to Caruso's direction. The movie is slick but still gritty, visually, avoiding excessive green-screen usage and smashing up a lot of real objects.

There is even a virtuoso chase scene/shootout that takes place on the tangled inner network of belts inside the bowels of an airport's baggage transport area.

It is just the sort of clever material that any person unfortunate enough to have spent many an hour stuck in an airport has daydreamed of.

Unfortunately, in "Eagle Eye," inspired locations and well-played scenes don't mean much. The surprises in "Eagle Eye" work backwards, with things becoming a lot less thrilling the more we learn.

"What if this is all just to cover up something 50 times bigger?," one character asks. Bigger? The second reel of "Eagle Eye" may be bigger. Is it better? Definitely not.

LaBeouf and Caruso's "Disturbia" is currently coming under fire and facing legal trouble because of its glaring similarities with Alfred Hitchcock's masterful "Rear Window."

One of the problems with the second half of "Eagle Eye" is how much it borrows from other films.

Without giving anything away, suffice it to say that fans of "2001: A Space Odyssey" may be glad to see one of their favorite characters reincarnated in "Eagle Eye."

Another problem with many of the revelations in "Eagle Eye" is how preachy and downright corny they are.

While it is one thing for a thriller to be politically minded and reference current or recent events, it is another thing for it to offer such references in so much of an in-your-face manner that it insults the audience.

"Eagle Eye" starts and ends in fine thriller format but somewhere in the middle it jumps the shark pretty unforgivably.

When a movie starts quoting the U.S. Constitution at you, it is strike one. When it writes those quotes out onscreen as it speaks them, it is strike two. When it bases nearly all of its thrills on the offending scenes in which these quotes are read, and in a villain that is lifted brazenly from another thriller; it is strike three.

By the time this scene arrives, however, "Eagle Eye," has already struck out. Barreling towards its victorious (for the characters, not the audience) ending it gives in to increasingly absurd action.

Before you know it, "Eagle Eye" is letting spy planes chase characters into areas that planes should never go, no matter how neat it is going to look when they inevitably explode.

The film's explosive conclusion is remarkable only in the way that it directly lifts endings from two classic thrillers, Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much" and Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey."

"Eagle Eye" will still do the trick for many a bored weekend movie-goe, and it has already topped the box office charts.

Anyone seeking a plausible or original thriller, however, will find themselves stuck with a brisk, paranoid, fatally outlandish 100-minute trailer that is bound to go into Steven Spielberg's "kind of rushed that one out" drawer.