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...Or at least that’s what those thunderous voices emanating from the Titans of Tinseltown have been bellowing for the last few years, as the ever-encroaching spectre of Shia LaBeouf slowly began infiltrating the tranquility of our daily lives. From the moment he was cast in Walt Disney’s Holes (Has there ever been a dirtier sounding family film?), the buzz has been deafening, and the back-to-back-to-back hits Disturbia, Transformers and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull were likened to triumphant blasts, herald
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Which brings us to Eagle Eye, a head-slappingly absurd cyber-thriller, which pairs LaBeouf’s Jerry, a Copy Cabana-employed ne’er-do-well, with pretty single mother Rachel (Michelle Monaghan), and sets
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Now fine, the set-up for Eagle Eye is actually promising, and LaBeouf has a nicely shifty personality (though bad teenage facial hair was a questionable choice), all off-beat gesticulating and rapid-fire speech patterns, that’s fun to see plugged in to something t
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It turns out that the mysterious “voice” is Project Eagle Eye: a rogue governmental computer dubbed ARIA, which is modelled so closely to 2001’s HAL 9000 that I hope Stanley Kubrick’s estate is getting royalties. It has decided that the United States government is in a critical state of disarray and in need of interve
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Director D.J. Caruso, who helmed Disturbia, tries to ground all this nonsense by attempting to shoot the picture like a half-witted homage to seventies’ cinema. He has the gritty filters down, but his action beats are flat out embarrassing. The film’s first intended show-stopper, a rapid-fire chase through downtown D.C., has apparently been shot and edited by a blind epileptic, while the second, featuring a self-flying attack plane, is a second-rate rip-off of Stealth and Live Free or Die Hard. I don’t even want to describe C
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Perhaps Eagle Eye’s most egregious crime, however, is wasting such an impeccable supporting cast. Rosario Dawson and Michelle Monaghan (who earned serious geek-cred with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) are as devoid of personality as their super-powered puppet master. At least Billy Bob Thornton, who bears a mad glint of secret self-amusement, almost manages to rouse the audience awake with his oddball behaviour and (likely improv-ed) dialogue.
This brings us back to LaBeouf: the Man, the Myth and the Legend. He’s engaging and idiosyncratic, and able to make badly-written sarcastic dialogue about trains turning into talking ducks strangely
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1.5 out of 5
P.S.: The final scene, an obvious studio intervention, is a howlingly miscalculated attempt at a sunny ending. My fellow movie-goers tittered their way through the whole thing.
*Originally printed in SFU's The Peak: Oct. 6th, 2008.
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