"Eagle Eye" moves at a breathless pace, as if you were watching a DVD on fast-forward. That's because if the audience gets a chance to breathe or think, it may start poking holes in the increasingly preposterous concept.

The race-against-time thriller, starring Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan, examines what happens when technology turns on us. It takes today's tools -- security cameras, cell phones, electronic billboards, ATMs, GPS devices and computerized collections of personal data, for starters -- and makes them weapons of mass or personal destruction.

LaBeouf plays Jerry Shaw, a brainy slacker who ceded his parents' attention to his overachieving twin, quit Stanford University and now works at a Chicago copy shop. After his brother dies, Jerry returns to an apartment filled with terrorist supplies he did not order.

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'Eagle Eye'

2 stars = Mediocre
Ratings explained

• Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan.
• Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of action and violence and for language.
• Web site: 'Eagle Eye'

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When he fails to heed a cell phone warning that the FBI will arrive in 30 seconds, Jerry is arrested and interrogated by an agent (Billy Bob Thornton) who doesn't believe anything the young man says. With a little help from the mysterious voice on the phone, Jerry is back on the street and ordered to join forces with a single mother (Monaghan), whose son will be killed if she doesn't follow the faceless orders.

"Eagle Eye" tracks the pair through multiple states and scrapes as they try to survive and figure out who is guiding their every move.

It reunites LaBeouf with director D.J. Caruso ("Disturbia"). In his first adult role, LaBeouf is very good, by turns jittery, paranoid, pained and confused, while Monaghan is in an acting strait jacket. When "Eagle Eye" has them on the run, with personalized messages on the train or in McDonald's, it seems ground-breaking and gutsy.

But then it layers on the twists and minor characters and lays out the puppet-master's elaborate plan and collapses on itself, perhaps from the weight of four writers.

It builds to the sort of operatic, tension-filled scene that Alfred Hitchcock did so well but here feels ludicrous, and then tacks on an ending designed to please the audience before they pull out their phones, check their messages and leave the theater.