Eagle Eye

Eagle Eye: Thriller. Starring Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan, Rosario Dawson and Billy Bob Thornton. Directed by D.J. Caruso. (Rated PG-13. 120 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

So imagine this. A young slacker, who can't even pay his rent at a boarding house, goes to an ATM and finds 750K in his bank account. He goes back to his one room, feeling rich and lucky, and sees that dozens of packages have arrived for him. But what are they? Guns, chemical weapons and explosives. And then, before he has a minute to digest this - boom - the FBI comes through the door and arrests him as a terrorist.

Now that's a premise, folks. Sure, maybe it's not one for a masterpiece, but it's more than good enough to take an audience from dead-stop indifference to full-throttle interest: What is going on? Who is doing this? What is going to happen next? Those questions are what "Eagle Eye" has going for it. The rest of the movie doesn't have three brain cells to rub together, but the premise carries it a long way.

An engaging Shia LaBeouf plays the young man, plucked out of obscurity and suddenly in trouble. How's this for a bad break? He is taken to headquarters and Billy Bob Thornton turns out to be the agent assigned to his case: "This is the wrong time to be in the terrorism business."

The title character in "Eagle Eye" is a woman's voice, who calls our hero on his cell phone and demonstrates that she can see him, wherever he goes, whatever he does. She threatens him. The voice also sees, hears and gives orders to Michelle Monaghan, who plays a divorced mother with no connection to government or politics. Using threats and coercion, the voice brings the two characters together for a miserable thrill ride. The nature of that voice - who is she, and what does she want? - is the central mystery of the picture.

Three things keep "Eagle Eye" from being an unambiguous success. The first is that the power of the unseen voice is so complete that it verges on ridiculous. The voice sees and overhears everything everywhere, controls all machinery and can kill anyone at will, to the point that the movie, at times, threatens to slip into farce. The second is that director D.J. Caruso falls too much in love with his set design, and so he slows down the pace and lavishes time on scenes that are essentially static. Finally, though the movie answers every plot mystery it raises, the answers are a little pat. Not terrible, just a bit disappointing.

It's as if, somewhere in the middle, the studio decided to invest real money in "Eagle Eye" and bloat it into a major action movie, instead of a small, cheesy thriller. There were the makings here of a really good small, cheesy thriller.

-- Advisory: Lots of action violence, but nothing too disturbing.