I have a confession to make; as much as I value good filmmaking, complex stories, moving performances, and breathtaking cinematography, there's just something about those completely implausible, totally predictable, guilty pleasures of Hollywood candy that gets me. As Jules tells Kimmy in My Best Friend's Wedding, sometimes you just want Jell-o. As almost anyone will admit, there are just some nights where all you want is beer and pizza. And on the eve of Oscar roll-outs, Eagle Eye is just that. It may be more predictable than the laws of physics, it may contain more cheesy lines than a bar on Friday night, and it may less believable than a lying three-year-old, but it is still mighty entertaining.

Upon opening, Eagle Eye is like a less stylized PG-13 version of this summer's Wanted. Young guy going about his life suddenly finds large amounts of money in his bank account, gets a mysterious call, and finds himself pulled into a violent mission of unknown purpose. The premise: someone or something has the ability to track every single move he makes, someone or something has selected Jerry (Shia LaBeouf) to complete some task, and that very same someone or something will not stop short of manipulating and controlling every piece of electronic equipment on the planet to make sure Jerry both complies and succeeds with its agenda.

The setup is a world heading in the direction of The Matrix and not far off from The Minority Report. Somehow central to the movie's events is a piece of technology that may very well have been stolen from Batman's cave sometime after he fled into the darkness. And as Jerry and another recruit named Rachel (Michelle Monaghan) scramble to keep up with their all-knowing and -controlling stalker, it really is as if Eagle Eye took Wanted, replaced mysterious legends with technology, turned this twist backwards and that twist upside down, flip-flopped villains, and capped it all off with either the exact same or the exact opposite message (depending on how you look at it).

Like Wanted, central to the story of Eagle Eye is the concept of some sort of supreme knowledge and justice for the greater good. At one point, Jerry and Rachel's mysterious caller quotes them the preamble of the United States Constitution. The message being, they, two people of the United States, are now being called on to do what needs to be done to "establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." Because their caller knows everything, she also knows what needs to be done to ensure that those goals of the Constitution are met. Add the fact that not everyone agrees with her mission—merely a matter of identifying and getting rid of everything and everyone who stands in the way of that greater good.

But as Lucius Fox told Batman when he revealed his own super-surveillance system earlier this summer, "this is too much power for one man." And as Eagle Eye unfolds, it is that truth that is confirmed. Total knowledge, complete control, and supreme judgment are in fact too much for any one man, one woman, or, for that matter, one thing to hold. As we saw in Wanted, the belief in one's supreme power and ultimate right to judgment leads nowhere good. And in Eagle Eye, we witness the even further consequences of knowledge that leaves no room for question, and judgment that leaves no room for redemption.

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