She has just put her beloved freckled eight-year-old, Sam (Cameron Boyce), on a train to Washington DC, where he’s playing with his school band at the Kennedy Center as the President is making an important address on terrorism. He will soon follow cellphone directed orders and meet up in a shiny new black Porsche Cayenne with a fellow Illinois target of the cellphone lady, the divorced single mother and para-legal Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan). The cellphone lady calls again to warn him to duck under the table as the blast is just seconds away and soon the room where Jerry’s held has a giant hole in it made by an explosion and quicker than you can say North by Northwest our boy Jerry is the framed innocent on the run. When he balks, the FBI’s counter-terrorist unit arrests him and he’s grilled for being a terrorist by flaky Agent Thomas Morgan (Billy Bob Thornton). When he returns to his Chicago apartment to pay his kindly landlady the back rent, his apartment is filled with high-tech military gear and a mysterious woman on his cell phone warns him the counter-terrorist wing of the FBI is on the way to arrest him as a terrorist and his only chance of escape is to follow her orders.
Depositing a check his concerned dad slipped him at an ATM machine, the shocked Jerry finds 750K in his previous busted bank account. His brilliant twin brother Ethan, working in a top secret high post in the military, is run over by a truck and Jerry attends his funeral. Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf) is a Stanford dropout who traveled aimlessly around the world and now the impoverished slacker works in a Chicago copy store, and is estranged from his middle-class family over his lack of ambition. It’s War Games without a sense of direction of where it’s heading. For a brief second or two the film flashes concern about the newest technology being used to invade the privacy of its citizens, but quickly turns the Big Brother scenario into a silly and far-fetched thriller about a slacker saving the United States from a cyberspace terrorist attack (the unseen enemy is a Hal-like in-beta national security supercomputer known as Aria, that’s gone amok). The team of writers responsible for the ridiculous plot, unoriginal stale story and trite dialogue are John Glenn, Travis Adam Wright, Hillary Seitz and Dan McDermott, who keep it predictably formulaic as a race-against-time thriller (How many times can Hollywood run that by us?). Caruso (“Disturbia”/”Taking Lives”/”The Salton Sea”) takes the Michael Bay route in filming a non-stop action thriller and comes up with the same preposterous big explosion nonsense. It also favors us with poor acting by the leads, Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan, who play harried innocent victims thrown together by strange circumstances and have a romance that’s not warranted since they have no chemistry together. It favors us with fake excitement over nothing much to follow. “A loud, muddled and empty sci-fi thriller.”Ī loud, muddled and empty sci-fi thriller that’s derivative and makes no sense though it covers real territory from today’s newspaper headlines. Caruso screenwriters: John Glenn/Travis Wright/Hillary Seitz/Dan McDermott cinematographer: Dariusz Wolski editor: Jim Page music: Brian Tyler cast: Shia LaBeouf (Jerry Shaw), Michelle Monaghan (Rachel Holloman), Rosario Dawson (Zoe Perez), Michael Chiklis (Defense Secretary Callister), Anthony Mackie (Major William Bowman), Ethan Embry (Agent Toby Grant), Billy Bob Thornton (Agent Thomas Morgan) Runtime: 118 MPAA Rating: PG-13 producers: Pat Crowley/Alex Kurtzman/Edward McDonnell/Roberto Orci DreamWorks SKG 2008)
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