by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyrigt © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I frantically looked through the backlog of DVD’s
we’ve picked up on close-out tables to find something Charles and I could watch
together and which would be over before Stephen Colbert’s program came on —
which let out Ridley Scott’s Crusades spectacle Kingdom of Heaven and Pola X, a film I’ve wanted to run as a memorial to the great singer and
composer Scott Walker (no, not that
Scott Walker!), both of which were too long. The film I came up with turned out
to be unexpectedly good: Eagle Eye,
a 2008 War on Terror-themed thriller starring Shia LaBeouf (whose name I’ve
been misspelling “LaBoeuf,” like the French word for “beef”) as Jerry Shaw, a
resident of Cleveland who supports himself by working a shit job at a place
called Copy Cabana (in one early scene he’s shown fielding the stupid questions
real people who work at real copy centers have to deal with from customers) and
“taking” his fellow employees in poker games in the break room. He’s got a twin
brother, Ethan Shaw, who works on a super-secret program in the Department of
Defense — throughout their childhoods Ethan was always the high-achieving
go-getter and Jerry the slacker — and his life is suddenly upended after Ethan
mysteriously dies in a car crash. First Jerry goes to withdraw money from his
ATM, which had previously told him his account was overdrawn, and suddenly he
has a bank balance of over $700,000 and the machine is frantically spitting
cash at him. Next he goes to the room he rents from the stereotypical
hatchet-faced landlady, and she asks him why he’s received so many deliveries
lately. He enters his room and it’s full of boxes of merchandise he’s seemingly
ordered from Terrorists ’R Us: state-of-the-art guns in black padded cases,
ammonium nitrate fertilizer (the stuff Timothy McVeigh made the Oklahoma City
bomb from, remember?), passports from several countries in several languages
(recalling the multiple passports Humphrey Bogart found when he searched Peter
Lorre in The Maltese Falcon) and
just about everything else the well-equipped revolutionary cell seeking to
bring down a government could want.
Then he gets a call on his cell phone (an
old-style flip model that was probably considered obsolete even in 2008)
telling him that if he doesn’t get out of his room in the next 20 seconds, the
FBI will be there to arrest him. The FBI duly shows up, but Jerry gets away by
following the instructions of the voice on the phone — a female-sounding voice
evoking the inevitable comparisons with Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, though
I don’t think either of those programs existed when this movie was made — and
he ends up on the run along with Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan). Rachel
has been forced into whatever plot that sinister phone voice is executing
because her son has been kidnapped and will be killed if she doesn’t go along.
Her son Sam (Cameron Boyce) is a student at a boarding school called “Peace
& Love High School” and a trumpet player in the school’s band whom we see
practicing “The Star-Spangled Banner” before he gets snatched. Also in the dramatis
personae are FBI agent Thomas Morgan (Billy
Bob Thornton, only a bit less twitchy than usual) and defense secretary
Callister (Michael “Thing” Chiklis), as well as FBI agent Zoe Perez (an
effective performance by Rosario Dawson), who is leading the operation to
apprehend the leads but is eventually persuaded that they’re on the good side
and deserve help. The whole plot was kicked into motion by an operation in the
Middle East in which special forces thought they had run a prominent terrorist
to ground at a funeral he was attending. ARIIA, the super-computer of the
Department of Defense, relayed to Callister that the intelligence they had
indicated only a 37 percent chance that the person they had sighted was indeed
the terrorist they were after; later information upped that to 51 percent but
ARIIA still recommended that the attack be aborted. Callister called the
President, and the President gave the go-ahead signal, the attack took place,
and it turned out to be an ordinary funeral without any attendees having any
connection to anti-U.S. terrorism.
From these plot premises Eagle Eye turns into the sort of film you’d probably get if
you could reincarnate Philip K. Dick to write a script about terrorism and if
you could also reincarnate Alfred Hitchcock to direct it — scene after scene
puts our reluctant hero and heroine in immediate peril as they flee for their
lives and wonder whether that mysterious female voice is ultimately helping or
hurting them, the sort of thing Hitchcock did in his big chase movies like The
Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Saboteur
and North by Northwest — and the
payoff is a direct ripoff from Arthur C. Clarke’s script for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001:
A Space Odyssey. It seems that the
super-computer ARIIA, like HAL, was literally driven crazy by the conflicting
demands made on it: following the failure of that Middle Eastern mission, ARIIA
decided that the real danger to the U.S. was from the President and the entire
chain of command because they’d signed onto an operation that would only hurt
the U.S.’s image in the world without any benefit to the national security. So
ARIIA decided to eliminate not only the President but everyone else in the
chain of succession — all except Defense Secretary Callister, who earned the
computer’s reprieve by going along with its decision to abort the operation
until the President personally overruled him. The mass assassination is
supposed to occur at the State of the Union address because all the targets
will be there, and it’s supposed to be carried out with a recherché gimmick that was actually used in a couple of
Charlie Chan movies in the 1930’s (and, in a satirical context, in the “Girl
Hunt” ballet sequence in the 1953 film The Band Wagon): the U.S. has developed a super-powerful explosive
that looks like a quartz stone, and it can be triggered by the vibrations from
a certain musical note — which Sam Holloman is supposed to supply when he hits
the sustained high F in the Peace and Love High School’s arrangement of “The Star-Spangled
Banner,” which the school’s band has been invited to perform at the State of
the Union ceremony.
The good guys have to figure out how to disarm the computer
without activating its self-defense mechanism and getting themselves killed,
and the significance of Jerry being an identical twin is that the computer’s
plot, called “Project Guillotine,” required activation either by Ethan or
someone with identical genes — which is why ARIIA sucked Jerry into the plot in
the first place. At the end Jerry disrupts the plot by firing a gun in the air
in the middle of the State of the Union just before Sam plays the lethal high
note; for this he’s gunned down by the security detail (he got a gun onto the
floor of Congress by impersonating FBI agent Morgan, who in an earlier scene
was killed in a car crash supposedly engineered by ARIIA — whose ability to
hack into any database and assure
seemingly whatever outcome it wants seems almost supernatural after a while),
but somehow he turns up alive at the end and he and Rachel are reunited (it’s
established that she was single after a bitter breakup with Sam’s father, who’s
listed in the dramatis personae
but I don’t recall him). Eagle Eye
is actually a marvelous film, capably directed by music video veteran D. J. Caruso
from a committee-written script (Dan McDermott, John Glenn — almost certainly
not the same one — Travis Adam Wright and Hillary Seitz), well acted (for once
Shia LeBeouf gets to play a character with some dramatic definition after doing
his usual slacker “bit” in the early scenes) and convincing me that if Cory
Doctorow’s marvelous Little Brother
ever gets filmed (and it should be!), Caruso would be a good choice to direct
it.
