Eagle Eye

Empire Ian Freer

A fun techno romp, mixing great bang for your buck with insights into the dangers of restricting civil liberties. Now, anyone for Shia killing blondes dressed as his dead mother?

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

The movie is so engrossing as an intellectual puzzle and such a solid thriller in every other department that it's probably actor-proof.

Austin Chronicle Josh Rosenblatt

Good, manic fun plus a heavy dose of political intrigue adding up to two hours of clamorous, mind-numbing nonsense.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Monaghan gives a solid performance, and Billy Bob Thornton has sarcastically funny bits as an FBI agent.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

What Eagle Eye wants to do is show us technology's dark side: all the stuff that's there to make our lives easier - ATMs, PDAs, iPods, GPS, cell phones, PCs, "smart" houses - turned against us in a vast conspiracy.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Eagle Eye has half an idea in its head, but over two hours there's no time to complete or explore it, since the movie isn't just a chase but a combination steeplechase and destruction derby.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

A movie only a copyright lawyer could love. It strip-mines at least three Hitchcock classics - "North by Northwest," "The Wrong Man," and "The Man Who Knew Too Much" - then commits unlawful assault on Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" just for the heck of it.

Film Threat Mark Bell

In the end, the film isn't a complete waste of your time, and it is a neat little walk down a Patriot Act assisted cyber-terrorist "what if..." scenario, but don't expect anything brilliant.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

LaBeouf shambles through the movie with an endearingly lost quality -- his savoir faire is of the hangdog kind, but it pretty much works. And Monaghan, with that upturned nose and those mischievous eyes, always looks like a woman in search of trouble.

New York Post Kyle Smith

With its array of chases and shootouts and a sinister political plot, the movie at least holds your attention and keeps things brisk-ish. But every scene still bears the tags of the place from which it was stolen.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

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

USA Today Claudia Puig

A terrorist thriller that isn't so much suspenseful as overbearing. Though it aspires to be an intriguing political cautionary tale, the movie is mostly about the feverish and jarringly choreographed chase scenes.

Variety Robert Koehler

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

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

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. It's not an assault on intelligence. It's an assault on consciousness.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

At least LaBeouf makes for a likable hero. He's got the same kind of easy, natural charisma as Will Smith -- who, come to think of it, starred in another techno-paranoia thriller, "Enemy of the State," that Eagle Eye strongly resembles.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

The movie doesn't have three brain cells to rub together, but the premise carries it a long way.

Washington Post Neely Tucker

A sometimes entertaining flick that makes a lot of noise but doesn't have much to say.

Slate Josh Levine

Quips alone do not a popcorn-movie star make. In this age of post-steroidal leading men, you don't need to be Arnold Schwarzenegger to carry a movie, but you do need to have some presence.

NPR Bob Mondello

Idiotic, if reasonably kinetic, Eagle Eye -- in which Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan spend the better part of two hours urgently answering phone calls and dodging hurtling machinery -- is every bit as over-edited as it is under-thunk.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

A brain-squandering thriller.

The Hollywood Reporter Michael Rechtshaffen

A shrill, far-fetched thriller.

LA Weekly Robert Wilonsky

From tepid start to laughable middle to thudding finish (and the final two minutes smack of a reshoot), it's nothing but a herky-jerky clusterfuck of noise and nonsense.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

The movie itself is hyperactive and a jumble.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

There is no truth to the rumor that free frontal lobotomies will be performed at the entrance to all theaters showing Eagle Eye.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Noisy, derivative and thoroughly preposterous even by the standards of 21st-century action movies.

Premiere Eric Kohn

It's an empty-headed look at a national problem with modern surveillance society, but if everyone acted as stupidly as the incredulous screenplay would have you believe, then it's safe to say the movie inadvertently reflects, rather than critiques, the insanity of our times.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Questions: Did everyone involved in this botched thriller OD on speed? Does jimmy-legs director D.J. Caruso think if he slowed down the action we'd figure out how stupid the plot is?

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

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.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin

It'd probably feel just a little bit timelier and more relevant if it took place in a universe that bore even the faintest resemblance to our own.

New York Daily News Joe Neumaier

See, everyone complains about humans in movies but no one does anything about it, so it fell to Eagle Eye to make everything laughably, ridiculously fake.