Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Eagle Eye

I went to see this movie last week, by accident, as I was too late for my intended Burn After Reading. Think of this as a kind of dumb Enemy Of The State meets a dumber The Forbin Project meets needlessly wordy and clumsy 2001.

I love movies. This year, easily the worst and most disappointing movie I've seen is Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the... whatever. Who cares. I'll never get that time back. Perhaps the hype was too much, but for me it's become this year's lowest bar and so far I haven't seen a new release which matches the utter crapness of Indie.

Spoiler!

So Eagle Eye is not as bad as Indie. By a long mile. Neither is it excellent. A standard popcorn action thriller with CCTV society paranoia thrown in. The twist is guessed early on and Shia LaBeouf (also in Indie) does what he does. He plays a kind of harmless genius slacker who is pulled into a plot by a nasty supercomputer to kill the president and his cabinet . The female-voiced supercomputer is miffed that the president and his poodles are randomly bombing innocent villagers in foreign lands against the pissed-off pc's advice.

This computer is no ordinary nutty HAL; it uses the US Declaration of Independence as it's moral compass and concludes that killing innocent folk breeds terrorism and attacks on the US so the government is failing its duty to keep its people safe. Realising that the electoral system is ill-placed to resolve the situation, the supercomputer decides to bin them with extreme blowingupedness.

After a lot of running around by LaBeouf and his screen squeeze, I got to a point where I couldn't care less for them. I started rooting for the bady guy. Or girl, computer, whatever.

In the end the computer gets it's plug pulled, the Pres is saved by LaBeouf after a ridiculous chase and everyone was happy. Except me.

I'm not sure if there was supposed to be a message or moral to this story. If there is, it's that governments should be allowed to get away with murder and it's every American citizen's responsibility to defend that right.

It's fast, plenty of action, fun stunts and enough explosions to keep any popcorn muncher happy.

I just wish the too-cute kid got wasted.

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