The film has an aesthetic look that is everybit as “pretty” as something that comes out of Michael Bay’s Dear Penthouse, I never thought I would shoot a film this well developed… fantasies. It has that beauty, without ever being stupid. The characters are developed, the turns are not predictable, the casting and random PEOPLE IN HIGH PLACES are there to SERVE THE STORY, not to artificially give it a sense of some misplaced grandeur and importance.

In fact everything in the film advances the story, every image has a payoff. Every loose end tied up. It’s sort of like a Phil Alden Robinson / Hitchcock / Michael Bay / John Badham type of mash-up… that never feels cookie cutter.

Re-teaming star Shia LaBeouf and director D.J. Caruso from last year's immensely popular, faux-Hitchcockian Disturbia, Eagle Eye, which had a special screening at Fantastic Fest with Caruso in attendance, might welcome comparisons to The Man Who Knew Too Much or The Wrong Man but is actually closer in spirit to The Net, Irwin Winkler's 1995 attempt to wrestle with identity theft and other perils of the information age. Like that movie, Eagle Eye exploits the all too common fear of technology, but shoves the premise way past common sense, positing a world in which an anonymous voice on a cell phone holds the power of life and death over complete strangers.

...Watching Eagle Eye in the midst of Fantastic Fest, in which dozens of genre films from around the world demonstrate time and again that a fresh, striking different approach can be incredibly successful, entertaining, and thoroughly please audiences, ultimately brings home the vacuity of the experience.

Perhaps Eagle Eye would not inspire such umbrage were it not for the film's blithe use of terrorism and patriotism as plot points, to a point that becomes risible and, frankly, noxious in its penultimate scene. If you're going to make a popcorn movie, by all means embrace the corn and stop trying to pretend that the story has any relevance beyond box office receipts.