Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan play two unsuspecting Americans drawn into a mysterious conspiracy in a race against time in Eagle Eye.

DREAMWORKS

Two strangers are conscripted into a dangerous mission they know nothing about by a mysterious woman on the phone who seems to know their every move, sending them on a wild cross-country chase with the FBI hot on their trail in the explosive paranoid thriller Eagle Eye.

The phone voice orders them to be part of the mission. Otherwise Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf) will be scooped up by the FBI and the son of Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan), on a band trip to Washington, will be killed. Soon Jerry and Rachel are in a race against time, taking orders from the silky-voiced woman who seems to know their every move, their every whereabouts. She calls them on strangers’ cell phones, they get instructions that are flashed on transit station message boards or parking garage signs. She seems to be everywhere, even telling them which turns to make to escape the pursuing police in what turns into a wild demolition derby chase through the streets of Chicago.

At one point she ingeniously arranges for Jerry to escape from a locked room during an FBI interrogation, later changing all the traffic lights to green to help their getaway.

There’s high-octane danger as they flee the cold-eyed lens of a bomb-laden military drone that’s searching for them inside an auto tunnel, are followed by a strange man on a lonely road, hide on a bus filled with Japanese tourists, nervously discover that the aluminum briefcase they’ve been ordered to carry is ominously ticking down the minutes, lock themselves in a cargo pod on a military jet that’s bound for parts unknown, only to surface 36 floors below a world-famous building.

Director D.J. Caruso and LaBeouf know their way around paranoia, having worked together previously on the eerie Disturbia. But this time Caruso, working from a script that’s credited to four writers, has all sorts of high-tech gadgets to play with and machinery to explode … not to mention the creepiest, most insistent computer since HAL chilled audiences 40 years ago in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The computer’s innards look like a giant honeycomb, a marvel of CGI engineering.

At the start of Eagle Eye, LaBeouf’s purposeless Jerry Shaw returns to Chicago from his more successful twin brother’s funeral to discover $750,000 has been deposited in his checking account and that drums of toxic materials and boxes of high-tech guns and gadgetry he knows nothing about have been delivered to his apartment. Quickly there’s that mysterious voice on the phone, warning Jerry to get out before the FBI arrives in seconds.

Soon he and Eagle Eye are off and running. He’s tossed together with Rachel by the woman on the phone that neither of them has met, but who seems to know every detail of their lives. Rachel is told by the voice that she has been “activated” and that she had better join Jerry or she will never see her freckle-faced son alive again.

The nonstop action offers plenty of thrills, whether Jerry is thrown onto the tracks in front of a Chicago elevated train or trying to race out of that auto tunnel as the military drone creates a huge barbecue pit out of the cars and trucks around them. Yet sometimes the smaller things in Eagle Eye work better than its more rampaging moments. The focus is occasionally lost in the car-smashing pursuit by the police through the streets of Chicago, while there’s much more suspense in a scene on a lonely road under electrical transmission lines where Jerry and Rachel are unnerved by a man in a white van following them. The scene evokes memories of the famous cornfield scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.

Like that film, Eagle Eye is a man-on-the-run thriller that’s peppered with paranoia. LaBeouf knows his way around death-defying situations thanks to his work in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which helps us believe that this perfectly ordinary looking twentysomething Everyman can pick his way through hair-raising situations with split-second decisions.

Monaghan, most recently in the romantic comedy Made of Honor, defines anxiety and fear. As Rachel, she has been thrust into frightening situations that she knows nothing about and must depend on the advice of the unseen phone voice which seems to be both her protector and her curse. Here there’s no hint of romance between the pair as Rachel and Jerry, pawns to do the bidding of the faceless woman on the phone, must forge a reluctant alliance to make it out alive. Yet a chemistry develops between these two strangers thrust into extraordinary circumstances.

LaBeouf and Monaghan get strong support from Billy Bob Thornton as a probing FBI agent who begins to wonder whether Jerry is as guilty as the evidence paints him; Michael Chiklis of TV’s The Shield as the U.S. Defense Secretary who takes a cautious approach to increasingly dangerous situations, and Rosario Dawson as an Air Force investigator who uncovers some very dangerous things going on at the Pentagon.

****

Eagle Eye

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan, Rosario Dawson, Michael Chiklis, Anthony Mackie, Billy Bob Thornton. Rated: PG-13, contains intense action and violence, profanity.

mjanuson@projo.com