A slickly packaged yet ultimately unpersuasive political action thriller, Eagle Eye collapses under the weight of various story incongruities, in large part because its sprawling, conspiratorial plot and mode of storytelling don’t ever quite fully align.

A re-teaming of Disturbia director D.J. Caruso and star Shia LaBeouf, the movie represents a crucial test of commercial leading man viability for the young actor. Set in and around Washington D.C., the story centers on a piecemeal terrorist plot, with different “cells” being activated against their will. Disaffected copy shop employee Jerry Shaw (LaBeouf) finds his life turned upside down when his twin brother mysteriously dies. Returning from the funeral, he discovers his apartment crammed with bomb-making supplies. A strange woman calls his cell phone and orders him to flee, but Jerry is captured, and questioned by FBI Agent Thomas Morgan (Billy Bob Thornton).

Simultaneously, single mother Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan) sends her 8-year-old son off on a school field trip, only to get a call from the same woman threatening to derail his train if Rachel doesn’t obey her orders. The voice on the phone is soon revealed to be a rogue, omnipotent government defense computer system, who brings together strangers Jerry and Rachel and parcels out instructions that unwittingly lead the pair into complicity in a scheme to eliminate most of the United States’ elected government. In pursuit of the on-the-lam duo, along with Morgan, is Air Force investigator Zoe Perez (Rosario Dawson).

Hatched several years ago by executive producer Steven Spielberg as a techno-phobic thriller, Eagle Eye shows the wear of much tinkering by many writers. The wildly preposterous plot hinges on governmental hyper-competence at a time when all evidence in the real world points to the contrary, and isn’t aided by brawny sequences that paint a colorful picture of the super-computer’s god-like abilities, which stand in stark contrast to the third-act messiness it spawns in trying to concoct a ruse that will eventually frame Jerry and Rachel.

Furthermore, there’s a baffling, poorly conceived scene mid-film — nakedly designed to pull the audience along, and distract from narrative potholes — in which the computer summons Jerry and Rachel to a consumer electronics store and reveals a portion of their mission. This would be akin to the Man Behind the Curtain outing himself halfway through The Wizard of Oz, just because.

Former television director Caruso has proven himself a stylish shooter of genre fare, and Eagle Eye is his biggest outing to date. From a technical point-of-view, the film is fairly well put together, though a first act car chase sequence is choppily edited, and lacks spatial clarity. Unfortunately, the method of conveyance doesn’t match the degree to which the story is steeped in paranoia and invasion of privacy. A grittier treatment or more futuristic setting would have been more in keeping with the story’s themes. Or a compelling case could be made for a tone of polished, heightened absurdity similar to this summer’s international hit Wanted. By spurning either of these more stylized visual approaches, Eagle Eye feels trapped between two worlds. (Paramount, PG-13, 117 minutes)

It was about 70 minutes into The Lucky Ones that I finally wrestled to the ground, in my mind, where the movie was going and what is was trying to say or accomplish. “In its own weird way, this wants to be the Sideways of Iraq coming-home tales,” I thought. There’s some of the same bittersweet clash of tonalities, and each movie, in large part, is about trading in self-defeatism and rueful doting for que sera deliverance, about locating the virtue of small victories and finding release in the fact that life is a journey and not a destination. (Heck, composer Rolfe Kent even provides the score for both films.)



All of this makes The Lucky Ones — mostly a humanistic dramedy, with a few pointed moments of flare-up — explosive for some very strange reasons. It’s a fascinating and in some ways slightly unnerving realization that we’ve seemingly reached a point in our collective national pop-cultural coping that allows for a movie like this, after having (broadly speaking) turned a blind eye on so many Iraq War dramas and documentaries, a handful quite superb.

Directed by Neil Burger, who made the interesting 2002 mockumentary Interview With the Assassin before transitioning into more streamlined narrative filmmaking with The Illusionist, the movie centers around three very different Iraq war veterans returning home from Landstuhl Air Force base in Germany, and the cracked road trip they share across the United States when their connecting flights out of New York City are canceled.

Fred Cheever (Tim Robbins), a married reservist with a teenage son almost ready for college, returns home to a wife who’s bluntly, emotionally moved on. This extends Cheever’s road trip with the cocky TK (Michael Peňa) and young, naïve Colee (Rachel McAdams). The latter is headed to Las Vegas, to deliver a guitar to the family of a slain pal. TK, meanwhile, is planning on a brief, headlong plunge into hedonism to make sure his sexual running gear, wounded by shrapnel, is in working order for his fiancée.

There’s a warm, easy rapport between the three actors, and while there are moments of flinty anger and edginess — Colee’s reaction to a put-down of her friend, plus a pointed political discussion at a house party in Kansas — these are momentary encroachments in an otherwise fairly lightweight, lighthearted film… maybe too lighthearted, actually. The movie is co-written by Burger and Dirk Wittenborn, who previously adapted his own novel Fierce People for the screen, and The Lucky Ones shares the aforementioned work’s sense of glancingly lacerating sociological observation, as when a Hummer salesman, after a mishap with the group’s first rental car, remarks that the Army vehicles they’re used to driving probably don’t have built-in cameras in the headrests like their commercial counterparts.

That keen sense of detail helps mitigate the lingering sense that this is all a bit too pat of a set-up, as do the movie’s fairly strong performances, particularly from McAdams. There’s certainly no disrespect intended by the filmmakers, but the tonal shifts here give off the sound and feel of a grinding gearshift; California wine country helps such bittersweet grappling go down much smoother than do battle-scarred veterans, it turns out. (Lionsgate/QED, R, 108 minutes)