Eagle Eye
Eagle Eye |
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| Film & Television - Movie Reviews | |||||||||
| Written by Ford S. | |||||||||
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Brought to You by: The Grand Theater at Pier Park The web has revolutionized film criticism, both in quantity and type. Before, a cadre of paid professionals dominated the industry, but now, armed with blogs, message boards and web-zines, a new army of film fans (like myself) get to write about a topic we love, and though unpaid, are frequented by a readership we would never have attracted in the world of paper and ink. But the most significant way the web has influenced the film world has come by way of the two big aggregators: Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. While in terms of judging a movie’s quality, their meticulously scored averages are no doubt an improvement on the old bottom-line box-office totals, and while they also grant the savvy film reader a hub to access virtually every available critic, the fact remains that they reduce a film to a poll number, and while polling has become a reliable means of judging public opinion, it has and never will be a reliable means of ascertaining the truth. Too often polling results are skewed by political concerns and band-wagon thinking, and thus we get ludicrously high numbers for films that are not all that good (Hellboy 2), and overcorrected low numbers for movies like Eagle Eye. RT currently assesses Eagle Eye’s fresh level at 26%, and while I do not intend to become this film’s minuteman, I will go on record and say, it’s bad, but not 26% bad. I will not reduce Eagle Eye to a number at this point, but I will reduce it to a word: derivative. There is little in Eagle Eye you have not seen before, and even less that has not been accomplished more effectively elsewhere. It almost feels like the plot of a couple of Will Smith blockbusters (including one that featured a small supporting role by Eagle Eye’s main star) was mixed in with sprinklings of Live Free or Die Hard, The Dark Knight, Seven, the Matrix, and, oddly enough, the recent Get Smart remake. The idea probably looked good on paper in treatment form, but obviously the powers-that-be had a harder time translating the germ of this idea to film, calling in three extra writers to help with the script (never a good sign). The scenes that set up our two principal characters bash us over the head with their subtext-“Jerry may be washed up, but he has potential” and “Rachel may be a caring mom, but she’s tougher than she looks.” It is not that such characters are uninteresting, but the way the writers try to get us to believe this subtext is. Jerrry’s poker-game speech, victory and the twist that follow are not only unconvincing, but boring. Rachel, meanwhile, after being established as the responsible parent, goes out for a night on the town, drinking Boilermakers with her friends, talking about booty calls and, when offered a drink by a boyish-looking businessman, utters the line, “No, he looks like the light beer type.” Uggghhhh. Director D. J. Caruso has no less difficulty translating the action into something that resembles watchability. The first car chase is so heinously-filmed, the only thing you can conclude with any certainty is that cars are crashing…somewhere. Sloppy and slipshod, the movie runs from mandatory action scene to pedantic hero-bickering, the only thing keeping us watching being the story’s potential ace-in-the-sleeve-twist, which ends up being a pretty well-worn joker, only unexpected because it is not supposed to be allowed in this game. Well, with words like these, who needs numbers? For some reason, whether the influence of my expectations (duly lowered by RT’s score and my initial gut-"that’s just like the Matrix"-reaction to the teaser trailer), I still found myself entertained by the movie, and though its social implications are not earth-shattering, the film did provide another wrinkle on the Big Brother warning that got me thinking. And, for me, any film that gets me thinking is worth more than a reduction to a low poll number, even if it is not shattering any boundaries. Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of action and violence, and for language.
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