Another reason not to use Windows Vista

Eagle Eye asks audiences to suspend disbelief to an unfathomable level. It might preface the request with this: “Don’t most thrillers, though?” Yes, but this one deserves some kind of special plaque, a pat on the head or maybe just a footnote in cinema history for plotting impossible developments and then asking us to believe them without chuckling.

But go ahead and chuckle, because on a deeper level Eagle Eye has to know it’s ridiculous. And if it doesn’t, then the fact that it takes itself so seriously could easily be just as funny.

The movie is one of those robots-become-aware science-fiction movies. It’s less sci-fi than say The Matrix or the Terminator movies, but it involves the same concept: a computer given artificial intelligence will start to make decisions it was never intended to make, including the elimination of the human element that created it. The genre, hardly a fresh one, was probably kick-started in 2001: A Space Odyssey when HAL 9000 refused to open the pod bay doors for poor Dave Bowman. Here, the computer is Eagle Eye and its purpose is to use advanced algorithms to protect the United States from terrorism. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The plot settles on Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf), a perpetual loser who works at a copy store in a bad part of town. One day his normally empty bank account is overloaded with funds and his usually bare apartment is overloaded with military hardware, including weapons, all of which are iron-clad proof of terrorist activity when the FBI arrives in door-smashing mode. Of course, Jerry is framed, but the hows and whys elude him until he starts getting phone calls from an icy-cold OnStar voice that tells him when to jump, duck and get on trains.

The voice — which can contact Jerry through hijacked cell phones, electronic billboards and anything slightly less illogical than biplanes writing in smoke in the sky — guides Jerry away from capture and deeper into trouble on a mission that is never clear until he arrives at the Pentagon the evening of the State of the Union. All along the route, he meets other victims of the voice who are given equally perplexing tasks that somehow fit into a larger plot that may involve explosive crystals, a trumpet and a computer named Aria. One of the victims, and Jerry’s travel companion, is Rachel (Michelle Monaghan, Made of Honor), whose son, a young and white version of Morgan Freeman, is threatened with train derailment should she not help Jerry on his thrill-a-minute quest.

Eagle Eye reminds me a great deal of North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock’s classic adventure about an innocent man who gets wrapped up in an international espionage scandal. The man (Cary Grant), some desk jockey at an ad agency, is forced to become a spy to prove he’s not a spy, which confirmed Hitchcock’s theory that regular people are far more interesting than action heroes. LaBeouf is no Cary Grant, but he plays the character with an invigorating zeal. He did an equally commendable job last summer when he played a Jimmy Stewart role in Disturbia, which was a loose copy of Hitchcock’s Rear Window — all LaBeouf’s missing now is a horror movie at a hotel (Psycho) and detective-thriller in San Francisco (Vertigo) to complete his neo-Hitchcock canon.

What a likeable guy Shia is. I’ve interviewed him twice and both times he was so wired with energy — naturally or chemically, I don’t know — it was infectious. He seems ambitious and that oozes from his roles. He sometimes seems like a punk, but he’s a punk with depth to his performances, even if they involve talking transforming robots. There’s a moment toward the end of Eagle Eye, with LaBeouf in a police officer’s uniform running around the catacombs of the Library of Congress, when I realized LaBeouf is one of the most consistently entertaining young actors working now, and this role is no exception. Although, I would have appreciated a better ending, one that didn't use the Shoulder Wound Rule.

LaBeouf’s character is chased by some other great actors, including Rosario Dawson as an Air Force investigator and Billy Bob Thornton as a G-man who does a Hollywood first: he has an air-to-ground battle with an unmanned Predator drone in a traffic-jammed tunnel. (On a side note, Live Free or Die Hard featured almost the same idea but spread out over three different sequences.)

In terms of plausibility, Eagle Eye starts to go haywire right at the beginning when military special forces deploy a modified paper airplane to track a terrorist. Later, when Eagle Eye goes online it seems to alter everything in the known universe to get Jerry to go where it wants. How can this be when at any given time 97 percent of the world’s computers aren’t communicating properly with the printers they’re hooked up next to? So yes, this is a very smart computer. Too smart, in fact, which is why it can control buses, traffic lights, sprinkler systems, military cargo planes, automated junkyard claws and every cell phone regardless of provider or minutes of use. In terms of functionality, it even tops the intelligent jet in Stealth, which, in an effort to learn, “downloaded the Internet … all of it.”

The actual hardware of Eagle Eye is housed 36 floors beneath the Pentagon in what looks like one of Tesla’s electric current experiments. Inexplicably, it’s stored over a lake of water, which makes me question its intelligence, but nevermind. It freely quotes the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, yet somehow still justifies killing people with high-voltage lines and 18-wheelers. Once the film establishes the power and the reach of the all-knowing computer, I found myself longing for a human villain instead of this floating computer orb.

But see, therein lies the dilemma with computer villains: they are flawed, often more so, than human characters. I have one of those GPS navigation systems in my car. It’s ingenious: it can not only tell me how to get somewhere and by what route, but also the arrival time within a couple of minutes. It maps any road in the United States, even some outback goat paths, and it can talk to me in 15 different languages including Suomi, which is the official language of Finland. But as clever as it is, sometimes the damn thing tells me to drive around a city block when I’m 30 yards from my destination. Sometimes, when at red lights, it shows that I’m parked past the intersection or at the next light. No computer system will be perfect, yet Eagle Eye’s is perfection personified, a technological marvel of the ages, which is why it doesn't work — it's too unrealistic.

As dopey-smart as Eagle Eye’s villain is, though, the movie has some killer stunts, a fast-moving pace and relentless action. Some of the chase sequences feature that Bourne Ultimatum hyper-editing style that’s likely to cause a seizure; I hate that style, but I’m in the minority ever since Bourne won an editing Oscar back in March. I’ve really railed on some of the plot elements, but I had a good time and found LaBeouf’s presence amid the mayhem an enjoyable factor. Just don’t go into Eagle Eye expecting to come out any smarter.