Shia LaBeouf‘s personal troubles have been widely discussed, both on and off the screen. Once earmarked as the next big Hollywood star, LaBeouf experienced a fall from grace around a decade ago. He has attempted to make amends with films like the semi-autobiographical Honey Boy; he has also tried to work his way back up with acclaimed indies. However, LaBeouf no longer works in the kind of top-tier productions that he used to, when Steven Spielberg took him under his wing. This was when the young actor, in the midst of breaking away from his “child star” image, played the lead role in Disturbia, a modern remake of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rear Window. He also landed the lead role in Michael Bay‘s Transformers franchise, and was momentarily positioned as the person who’d take over from Harrison Ford as the face of the Indiana Jones series.
In the same year that LaBeouf played Indy’s son in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, he starred in a techno-thriller that revolved around themes of mass surveillance and artificial intelligence. The concepts are more topical now than they ever were. In the movie, LaBeouf starred as the twin of a deceased soldier who finds himself in a government conspiracy with nothing but a voice in his ear for support. The voice instructs him to team up with a young mother, played by Michelle Monaghan, as they attempt to escape from the clutches of operatives on their tail. The film was directed by D.J. Caruso, who worked with LaBeouf on Disturbia a couple of years prior. If that film was a riff on Rear Window, the follow-up stuck to the North by Northwest playbook. It’s now streaming for free in the United States.
Happy Birthday, Connie Britton — The Collider TV Quiz!
Let’s help a prolific star blow out her candles by celebrating some of her long-standing work in television.
Here’s Where You Can Watch Shia LaBeouf’s 2008 Thriller for Free
The movie in question is Eagle Eye. It was released in 2008 to poor reviews but solid box office returns. Eagle Eye grossed a hair under $180 million worldwide against a reported budget of $80 million. However, reviews were rather negative. Panning the film, the late Roger Ebert wrote, “This film contains not a single plausible moment after the opening sequence, and that’s borderline. It’s not an assault on intelligence. It’s an assault on consciousness.” Eagle Eye now holds a 27% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the critics’ consensus described it as “a preposterously plotted thriller that borrows heavily from other superior films.”
You can watch the film for free on the Pluto TV platform this month. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
- Release Date
-
September 16, 2008
- Runtime
-
117 Minutes
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():format(jpeg)/ozzy-osbourne-jack-osbourne-God-Bless-Ozzy-Osbourne-080625-6e8c99a191d44345bd89bec5a72b4e8e.jpg)
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():format(jpeg)/Raven-Symone-030726-bf56ac01f4b24a1c9e145a62534ce150.jpg)
