EAGLE EYE. DreamWorks, 2008. Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan, Rosario Dawson, Michael Chiklis, Billy Bob Thornton. Director: D.J. Caruso.

   This is one of those thriller movies in which events start to happen as soon as the movie begins, almost faster than you can assimilate them, and the reason that you can’t put the pieces together is that they’re pieces of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle that takes time – be patient – until at last – finally – one key piece snaps into place, and all of sudden – but not before – do you see the big picture.

   Wonder of wonders, the people who made this movie made sure that the key piece I’m talking about is not discovered for a full three-quarters of the way through a two-hour movie.

   That’s a long time to keep people in the dark, so to speak, and I take my cap off to the director, screenwriters and players for pulling it off so successfully for so long.

   There are two main players, one male and one female, both in some sort of terrible danger and brought together to accomplish some sort of errand, plus one other whose name is not even mentioned above: a female voice on the phone whose commands must be obeyed, or else.

   This female voice also seems to have at her command every cell phone, every on street camera, every public piece of electronic equipment in the entire country, and more, leading Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf), suspected terrorist, and Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan), mother of a young son on a trip with his school band to play in a concert somewhere unspecified, on a series of more and more complicated errands – to do what?

   Other reviews of this movie may tell you more than I will, or intend to. Suffice it to say that you will be sitting on the edge of your seat (figuratively, and maybe even literally) for a good solid portion of the two hours you will spend watching it.

   I suppose there is an underlying moral involved, or maybe more than one, and one of them (which I think you can gather yourself from the paragraph above) is that there is not nearly enough privacy in this country any more. You may think you are alone, but very seldom are you alone as you think you are.

   After watching this movie, you may wish to give up your cell phones and GPS’s and maybe even your laptop computers that you take with you everywhere, but who among us is willing to do that?

   There are some political considerations that are also involved, and lots and lots of action scenes, with cars roaring up and down streets and turning over on their sides with lots of flames bursting from them, and all kinds of heavy machinery doing the unknown female voice’s bidding. You will not be bored.

   Shia LaBeouf is young and rather light weight as an actor, but he does well in this film and the Transformer movies in which a lightweight, or a slacker, is exactly the persona that’s needed. He didn’t do so well in the Indiana Jones movie he was in, in my opinion. The gravitas of a Harrison Ford he doesn’t have, yet.

   Michelle Monaghan, who was such a successful femme fatale in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, doesn’t have nearly the same opportunity in Eagle Eye to display her glamorous side. Frantic, though, she does very well, and overall, both actors are very determined to be a good sports about being in this movie. Both get solid A’s for Effort, and it shows. The screenwriters (all four of them) might have done it without them, but it would have been awfully difficult.