Eagle Eye: Critic Reviews

So hysterical in its terrorist subplot and its seizure-inducing action sequences that a pummeled viewer can be excused for texting WTF? to a friend in the middle of the chaos.

Eagle Eye churns and flails and piles on pointless and improbable complications.

Some nonsense is fun, but this wears you down.

Though it aspires to be an intriguing political cautionary tale, the movie is mostly about the feverish and jarringly choreographed chase scenes.

Eagle Eye, with a more nuanced idea of paranoia and the ills of technology gone wild, could have been both entertaining and disturbing. Deafening isn't quite the same thing.

[Hitchcock] for a modern age bloated by steroids, addled by action, and incapable of long-term attention.

Finally, an action-adventure thriller that feels as if it were created, directed and acted, soup to nuts, by a computer program.

Forget suspending disbelief; you would have to suspend consciousness to go along with this story.

The word 'preposterous' is too moderate to describe Eagle Eye. This film contains not a single plausible moment after the opening sequence, and that's borderline.

For all its digitally effected chaos, the cinematic threat level in Eagle Eye never even comes close to orange.

Caruso and Spielberg probably thought they were reviving the paranoid style of 70s political thrillers, but their story is so implausible it barely provokes a tremor.

Eagle Eye wants to be Marathon Man, or Enemy of the State, only with a post-9/11 overlay and a plot device lifted straight from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The film is a rag bag of concepts and characters from earlier, vastly better movies.

Die Hard meets The Fugitive meets 2001: A Space Odyssey in the fully paranoid Eagle Eye, a frantic thriller that's nowhere near as good as its influences but still manages to get the job done.

Manages to be both ominous and fun, making this a popcorn thriller with an edge.

The pic's first 35 minutes sizzle until a Byzantine plot nudges the story toward near-parody in the final act.

There are lots of new wrinkles to ponder about American surveillance, but it seems that all the writers have surveilled is HBO.

The fever-pitch paranoia of this terrorist thriller, the seizure-inducing editing, the dense layers slapped on a fairly simple plot all point to a kind of overkill that only Hollywood money can buy.

It all wears very thin by the third act, when The Voice really starts to grate and all remaining sense slams into a brick wall.

With less expensive actors, it might just have been called Chase Movie, and played for laughs.

At the very least, Eagle Eye gives us two principals who are appealing enough to keep us interested in them.

Eagle Eye feels less like a vehicle for an action hero than the latest in a series of national focus groups to determine LaBeouf's commercial viability.

Should this film be a huge box office success, it will stand as a sad testament to how low the bar for cinematic entertainment has been set.

As tightly coiled as a Slinky, and for all their running around, LaBeouf and the normally engaging Monaghan are stuck with characters who aren't particularly lively and, more problematic, fail to spark the requisite chemistry.