EAGLE EYE

Directed by DJ Caruso. Starring Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan, Rosario Dawson, Michael Chiklis, Billy Bob Thornton 12A cert, gen release, 117 min

HERE IS a film that offers a real challenge to the star ratings guide that accompanies our reviews. An amalgam of North by Northwest, The Parallax View and a big bucket of stupid, Eagle Eye is undeniably an entertaining piece of work.

As with similar exercises in narrative derangement, the film-makers' compulsion to fling ever greater idiocies at the viewer proves quite compelling. But you could not, in good conscience, sincerely recommend it to anybody with more wit than a donkey.

Eagle Eye does, to be fair, start quite well (if similarly to the recent Wanted). Shia LaBeouf, this generation's Sal Mineo, stars as Jerry Shaw, an underachiever who is working in a photocopying shop. After attending the funeral of his twin brother, a promising soldier, he returns to Chicago and is quickly propelled into clamorous disorder.

When Jerry puts his card into the ATM machine, he discovers that several hundred thousand dollars have been deposited in his account. More troublingly, crates of bomb- making equipment now sit on his living room floor and, as a mysterious voice on his mobile phone explains, the FBI are on their way to arrest him.

The sinister caller appears to have extraordinary powers. She can cause messages to appear on subway information boards. She can bring down power lines. Rachel (Michelle Monaghan), a single mum whose child is on a school trip, wonders if The Voice can derail trains.

Set up a situation this confounding and the solution is bound to tend towards the moronic. Sure enough, halfway through the picture totally loses its marbles and it never again comes close to recovering them.

Billy Bob Thornton is agreeably laconic as a cynical police officer, and LaBeouf continues to blaze with youthful charisma. But the final, eye-wateringly outrageous twists will strain the credulity of even the most simple-minded observer. So, it's two stars then.