Monaghan has been in everything from “Mission: Impossible III” and “Gone Baby Gone” to the recent Patrick Dempsey vehicle “Made of Honor.” She’s pretty and likable and edge-less enough to let Shia lead the way. They are strangers thrust into a nightmare puppet scenario when a mysterious woman contacts them by cell phone and forces them into dangerous situations. She is the single mother of an adorable trumpet player he is a copy associate whose twin brother just died. The leading lady in this case is Michelle Monaghan as Rachel Holloway. This is actually a good vehicle for Shia since it keeps him in his action zone, gives him at least one meaty funny-guy speech and lets him play the I’LL-listen-to-you-even-if-HE-won’t card on his leading lady. I wouldn’t dwell on the Spielberg connection, other than to remember he darn near worships little Shia and puts him in everything. Give us some names we can trust – Dreamworks, Steven Spielberg as executive producer, Shia as actor, the guy who directed Shia in “Disturbia” as director – and some pulse-pounding action. This is an action movie starring Shia LaBeouf, or as the guy in front of me at the box office told his cell phone, “That kid from ‘Transformers.’ … Yeah, it looks like it could be OK.” Those are our standards. “2001.” “Terminator.” “I, Robot.” “The Game.” Maybe even some “Phone Booth.” It depends on suspending disbelief not only in increasingly out-there machinations of the plot, but in the idea that this Big Brother is after you film is worth watching even though it’s been done to celluloid death. That’s just about the extent of his range everything else he does in “Eagle Eye” stems from the same smart alecky sensitive loser prototype he’s been charming or irking audiences with from “Disturbia” to “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”īut liking “Eagle Eye” doesn’t depend on liking LaBeouf. His slap-that-boy-upside-the-head attitude is a natural extension of Eddie Furlong’s character in “Terminator 2.” Plus, he showed in “Transformers” he can play nice with technology, and in “Eagle Eye” he shows he can play mean. While that might work as a film, it might not.Maybe Shia LaBeouf should play John Connor. Now it’s entirely plausible…how will it affect you? The story was in development for several years, because at the time Spielberg first conceived the idea, “he thought that it would seem too much like science fiction,” Kurtzman adds. “Steven always wanted people to walk out of the theater and turn off their cell phones and BlackBerrys, because they were so scared,” writer/producer Alex Kurtzman recalls – much in the way audiences feared swimming in the ocean after they saw Spielberg’s summer blockbuster “Jaws” in 1975. “It’s all around us – what would happen if it turned against you? What if the technology that surrounds us, that we love and depend on, suddenly was used on us in ways that could cause harm and was completely out of our control?” “Steven’s initial concept focused on the idea that technology is everywhere,” says co-producer Pete Chiarelli. The idea for “Eagle Eye” was hatched several years ago from the mind of executive producer Steven Spielberg. It sounds a lot like the premise that was used in Enemy of the State, namely the electronic Big Brother gone mad: I’m not quite sure what to make of the film’s plot, so I’ll reserve judgement until I’ve actually seen the film. In Eagle Eye, Shia LaBeouf is joined by Michelle Monaghan ( Made of Honor – already out on DVD) It’s being released in the UK this Friday. I mentioned the upcoming release of Eagle Eye a few months ago.
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