OVERALL 1/5
Director: DJ Caruso
Genre: action/thriller
Running time: 118`

Eagle Eye reportedly started as an idea of Steven Spielberg’s, but ended up being an insult to the intelligence even of those who deliberately switch their brains off when entering the theatre. Preposterous is too benign a word for what passes for a plot here and the chaotic action crammed together, which passes for a suspense surrogate.

That a movie is preposterously implausible is not always a bad thing – look at The Mummy or Indiana Jones – but they are supposed to be that way as they wink mischievously to the audience. Eagle Eye claims that it is taking place in the real world, though, where real people die and real cars get smashed to bits. What happens in this movie might have been fun when played as a video game, but what we see on screen is so wild that even the most enthusiastic, suspended disbelief will yield and break.

Jerry Shaw (Shia LeBeouf) is a classic movie layabout with a twin brother working for the air force who dies in a mysterious incident. One day he goes to an ATM machine and finds that the balance on his account has gone to $750 000. He gets home to find all rooms stacked with weapons and bomb-making components. He then gets a call from a mysterious woman with a voice as if from a GPS console, which tells him that if he does not get out in 30 seconds, he will be arrested. Meanwhile one Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan) gets a call from the same woman who informs her that unless she completes a series of actions, the train carrying her son will derail and the boy will be killed. The voice gets Jerry and Rachel together and keeps calling or plugging in to assorted adjacent electronic device in order to make its point and bully those two into doing its bidding. Both doing its bidding and trying to wrestle away from it means that the computer-generated effects department has an opportunity to run riot, which incidentally also means that the filmmakers are given enough rope to hang themselves. Scenes are edited at such break-neck speed that they simply stop meaning anything. It seems that chaos here was meant to pass for tension, but this gambit fails miserably.

What makes the movie doubly maddening is that it seemingly tries to slip in a message and raise a warning voice. Nominally, it should be reminding us about the ever-watching Big Brother or the dangers of placing too much trust and power in the hands of machines, but this is done with little insight and no grace. There is not an ounce of poetry or impact in all this and it only reminds us how much better this has been achieved in countless superior films: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Minority Report, even this year’s animated WALL*E. In tune with the numbing calamity on screen, LeBeouf and Monaghan do very little in terms of acting and are generally asked to look afraid while performing feats that they could not possibly do.

Notable actors such as Billy Bob Thornton and Rosario Dawson simply appear and pick up a check. I would have been better off spending two hours of my life doing something else. You have the unique opportunity to go one better.