Review: 'Eagle Eye' more ridiculous than thrilling

HAL goes mobile in "Eagle Eye," a shrill, frantic thriller about technology taking over -- and not in good ways, like making coffee for you before you even realize you want it.

No, this supercomputer has a political agenda, which theoretically might seem timely with the presidential election approaching. Instead, this half-baked indictment of the Patriot Act and the war on terror feels a few years too late -- maybe because that's when executive producer Steven Spielberg originally came up with the nugget of an idea that "Eagle Eye" would become.

Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan co-star as Jerry and Rachel, strangers who are forced to work together when their lives are commandeered by an oddly calm but insistent female voice -- like the one on your GPS but, you know, evil. She's everywhere, on their cell phones, on other people's cell phones. She can manipulate stop lights and air traffic, monitor every surveillance camera on the planet and send messages through TV monitors and electronic billboards. She makes the duo rob an armored truck, even stow away aboard a military plane.

But why is she doing this? What does she want? That's the overly simplistic mystery to be uncovered in the film from D.J. Caruso, reuniting with LaBeouf, whom he directed in the 2007 surprise hit "Disturbia." (The script comes from John Glenn & Travis Adam Wright and Hillary Seitz and Dan McDermott.)

Jerry is an underachieving copy store employee and Stanford dropout whose identical twin brother, a rising Air Force star, recently was killed in a car accident. Rachel is a single mom whose young son is on the way to Washington to perform with the school band at the Kennedy Center. The adventures into which they're thrown become increasingly far-fetched, to the point where they're not even mildly intriguing, just laughably ridiculous.

Caruso has put together a couple of heart-pounding sequences here -- a race through the ramps and conveyor belts of an airport cargo hold, for example, is clever and has a fun tangibility about it (though it must have been painful to shoot). But most of the action is edited in headache-inducing fashion. A car chase through the streets of Chicago is an incoherent, noisy jumble of crushed metal, shattered glass, blaring sirens and flashing lights.

LaBeouf and Monaghan, ordinarily likable and versatile, can't elevate this B-material. Following the blockbusters "Transformers" and "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," in which LaBeouf played a young man on the verge of adulthood, "Eagle Eye" is clearly meant to establish his emergence as a grown-up. We know this because he's sporting just the perfect amount of facial scruff. Better things surely are in store.

Members of the strong supporting cast are equally slumming it, including Billy Bob Thornton as the sarcastic FBI investigator who suspects that Jerry is a terrorist and Michael Chiklis as the secretary of defense. It's of vague interest to see Chiklis play a good guy, someone with a traditional moral code, after tearing it up the past several years as rogue cop Vic Mackey on "The Shield." But then he's saddled with spelling out the movie's rather obvious message: "We made a great many mistakes. ... The very measures we put into place to safeguard our liberties became threats to liberty itself."

"Eagle Eye," a DreamWorks Pictures release, is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of action and violence and for language. Running time: 119 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.