It can’t have been easy for Shia LaBeouf to escape both a troubled upbringing and the pressures of being a child star to establish himself as one of Hollywood’s fastest-rising young actors, but his ascent up the industry ladder was nothing short of meteoric.
In the space of a few years he’d co-starred with Will Smith in I, Robot and Keanu Reeves in Constantine, taken top billing in Michael Bay’s box office smash hit Transformers and shared the screen with Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but LaBeouf eventually grew cognizant of the rocket strapped to his back.
Before he made a conscious decision to step away from studio-backed projects, he landed another commercial hit in D.J. Caruso’s preposterous actioner Eagle Eye, which continued his loose association with Steven Spielberg, who directed LaBeouf in Crystal Skull and executive produced both Transformers and Caruso’s techno thriller.
LaBeouf is Jerry Shaw, a regular guy who discovers that his identical twin brother has been killed, setting off a chain reaction that finds him thrown into the path of Michelle Monaghan’s Rachel Holloman. The two strangers are forced to co-exist as an unseen enemy controls and manipulates their lives via the technology all around them, sending them on the run as the country’s most-wanted fugitives.
The plot is ludicrous, far-fetched and doesn’t make a lick of sense, so it’s probably going to fare very well on Netflix having been added to the library today, with high concept genre efforts always in with a shot of reaching the Top 10.