![]() ( After one of Aria’s remarkable, technology-harnessing stunts, he notes with eyebrows and hackles raised that “she could probably turn a train into a talking duck.” *) But quips alone do not a popcorn-movie star make. Perhaps owing to his start as a child stand-up comic, the one-time Disney Channel star has a facility for delivering post-explosion one-liners. After Transformers and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Eagle Eye feels less like a vehicle for an action hero than the latest in a series of national focus groups to determine LaBeouf’s commercial viability. ![]() ![]() Though Aria does serve as a handy preview of what the Patriot Act might allow circa 2016, this level of omniscience and omnipotence feels like overkill when used to push around Shia LaBeouf. By placing the menace off-screen, Eagle Eye tantalizes with the prospect that the enemy, once revealed, won’t be dumb. There’s also promise in the disembodied Knight Rider-gone-bad voice that’s commanding our heroes (LaBeouf and Mission: Impossible III’s Michelle Monaghan) to abandon the principles of defensive driving. For example, even as the movie borrows the traffic-light manipulations of Live Free or Die Hard and The Italian Job, its opening chase scene manufactures a few thrills of its own: The pacing, the sound, and the effects are all in the 90 th percentile of such things, and the closing cars-vs.-hooks-in-a-wrecking-yard bit will make for a tremendous set piece in a tie-in video game. While Eagle Eye’s waypoints are so familiar that a game of action-movie bingo wouldn’t last until the end of the first reel-look out for the briefcase with a red digital countdown-it does at least have some gloss around the edges. Caruso is the cuttlefish of directors, content to blend in with his action-movie surroundings rather than conjure an original vision.
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