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Predictable and ultimately silly, Eagle Eye proves to be no more than a time-drainer.

Jerry (Shia LeBouf) has a problem: He’s a loser in a dead-end job distanced from his rigid father and his ace Air Force twin brother. He bluffs his way through poker hands with coworkers and picks up pretty girls on the El Train (he lives in Chicago, as do most Americans in movies these days) with quick sketches he’s made of them.

His brother dies in a traffic accident, and that’s a problem too, but not as big as the one he finds when he gets home from the funeral: a bank account bursting at the seams and an apartment full of explosives, weapons, and technical readouts for American military vehicles. Seconds later he gets a call on his cell, and a serene feminine voice tells him he must escape now, as the FBI is seconds away from busting him. Sure enough, they do.

Single mother Rachel (Michelle Monaghan, divinely inspired in Gone Baby Gone, less so here) has a similar conundrum: either she does what the voice on her phone tells her to, or the “they” behind that voice will derail the cross-country train her young son’s school band trip is on. Jerry and Rachel are brought together by the mysterious, commanding voice, now considered enemies of the state by FBI agent Thomas Morgan (Billy Bob Thornton, the liveliest one here) and Air Force officer Zoe Perez (Rosario Dawson, about whom I cannot be objective).

From there it’s a good bit of chasing and explosions and whatnot, as the mysterious voice and his/her/its benefactors manage to hack into and control absolutely everything with a circuit board all the way from Chicago to Washington, D.C. This voice seems to know and control everything, and even has a nifty Power Point presentation ready to explain itself, should Jerry and Rachel make their way into a home theater setup in Circuit City. And wouldn’t you know it? They do.

As I understand it, the concept started off as a Steven Spielberg project. Spielberg was unable to film it—possibly because once the feminine voice reveals the real culprit, the whole thing becomes something like a comedy—and so DJ Caruso took over. (Spielberg retains an Executive Producer credit.)

Caruso’s had a remarkably uneven career; Disturbia was surprisingly engaging, whereas Two for the Money and Taking Lives are not worth the time it took to type out their titles. This addition will not be considered a success, marred as it is by unnecessarily sharp camera angles and that “blues-and-yellows” tone lesser directors have taken to adopting when they want us to know they are going about Serious Business. During one particular scene I felt Spielberg’s loss when, as explosions erupted and cars flipped, I realized I didn’t care what happened to anyone. Spielberg’s gift is to give us a reason to care about people in exceptional peril. Caruso and his writers couldn’t crack that one.

This movie is an obvious and unsubtle critique of the current surveillance state we voted into existence, and posits that no matter what you do, and where, someone is watching and cataloguing and filing away. But Eagle Eye fundamentally misunderstands its two prongs of critique: the small army of screenwriters, like our current administration, have apparently not grokked that terrorists are successful because they are a very low-tech operation, not hi-tech. (You will recall 9/11 was conducted with box cutters and simple misdirection.)

The second is that the threat of a surveillance state is not its potential for massive, world-ending, kill-you-where-you-stand supervillainy; the danger in a surveillance state is the sheer scale on which petty individuals can carry out their petty grudges; we call this the “Karl Rove Effect.” Interestingly, we’re meant to empathize with Agent Morgan, even though his very first scene has him gleefully telling Jerry just how easy it is to sidestep his Miranda rights. Um, yay!

I am the first person to defend the use of familiar genres (horror, science fiction, etc.) to explore moral and ethical grounds that might be difficult or unwieldy to confront head-on. Genre storytelling allows us to give ideas flesh and blood, to confront them and work with them and see how they might play off each other. This makes storytelling a damn handy tool and, I’d argue, mankind’s oldest and sturdiest one for dealing with larger-than-life issues. But when someone—say, Caruso and his writers—turns a faintly interesting thriller/SF premise into untethered fantasy and a whole lotta CGI explosions, I can rally no defense. Life is short, my friends.

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