Movie Review: Eagle Eye

We watched Eagle Eye the other night. I was looking forward to it since it looked like a pretty good action flick and from an action point of view it certainly fit the bill. From a plausibility standpoint, however, it was just way the hell out there. I understand about suspension of disbelief and all that, but holy crap.

Without giving away too much, some of the things the lady on the phone is able to do are just way beyond belief. She can control every cell phone and security camera in the country, not to mention street lights, construction cranes, subways, and even the demo TVs at Circuit City. At one point Jerry (Shia) turned his phone off, and within seconds, the phone of the guy sitting next to him on the train started to ring. To make that work, she'd have to:

• have a high-quality camera in the train car
• use it to take a picture of the guy's face
• use facial recognition software to figure out who the guy is, with an accuracy of one person out of 350 million
• find that person's cell phone number

Or maybe she could analyze the GPS coordinates of every cell phone in that area and figure out which one was physically closest to Jerry's. Which is off. On a moving train.

In another scene, she kills someone by somehow causing a power line to break. The broken wire falls and fries the guy. Even with complete control over the power grid, how could she cause a power line to break? And assuming she could do that, how could she do it in such a way that she knew that it would fall and hit the guy, who happened to be running at the time? Later she has Jerry and Rachel rob an armored car for a briefcase with a time-release lock that they risk their lives several times to try and protect. And when you think about where they are when it opens and what's in it, you realize that there were a thousand simpler ways to do it, all of which are less likely to fail that the one she chose.

One of the reasons she needed Jerry in the first place (to impersonate his twin brother) is moot, since the FBI would have revoked all of his security codes once he died. This part did make me wonder, however, if the real-life military (or CIA or FBI or whatever) would give top secret clearance to someone who had an identical twin, just for this reason. Their fingerprints and retinal scans would differ, but their DNA would be identical. Don't know about voice prints or even how accurate voice print identification is.

Anyway, LaBeouf was pretty good, though his character seemed unnecessarily abrasive at times. If someone put $750,000 in my bank account and filled my apartment with stolen military stuff and then I was arrested because of it, I might decide that being a dick to the FBI agent who's interrogating me would be a bad idea.

Having said all that, I have to say I did enjoy it. There were lots of car chases and explosions and overall, it was fun, if silly.

On a side note, I cannot watch a Shia LaBeouf movie without thinking he looks like Wil Wheaton:

Shia LaBeouf	Wil Wheaton