“Eagle Eye” has half an idea in its head, but in the course of two hours there’s no time to complete or explore it, since the movie isn’t just a chase, but a combination steeplechase and destruction derby. As two innocents mysteriously enlisted into outwitting our entire national security system, Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan never elude obstacles when they can just crash into them. By the time a lethal high-tech glider starts trying to take out good guys in Washington, D.C., the damage isn’t collateral: it’s central.

“Eagle Eye” is one of those thrillers that hinges on carefully engineered surprises. They have to be surprises, since, at least in the first hour, you’re not given the information to anticipate them.

LaBeouf plays Jerry Shaw, a woebegone under-achiever and a Stanford dropout. He starts receiving life-or-death commands on his cell phone on the day of his golden-boy twin brother’s funeral. All he hears is a bland woman’s voice, but this gal has the whole country wired. She uses every device on America’s power and information grids to send Jerry messages, and she manipulates stoplights and power cranes to crush his pursuers.

Her orders maneuver him into the same getaway car as Rachel Holloman (Monaghan), a single mother who agrees to obey the female voice after Our Lady of the Cell Phones threatens her son. When Jerry discloses that his brother Ethan was in the Air Force, Holloman assumes the dead Shaw did something to trigger this disaster — and Jerry doesn’t take kindly to the idea.

Yoking together two battling personalities who develop affection for each other has been a sturdy device ever since Hitchcock used it brilliantly in “The 39 Steps.” LaBeouf, who worked well with the director, D.J. Caruso, on their entertaining “Rear Window” take-off, “Disturbia,” skillfully channels early John Cusack as a boy-man who doesn’t know his own strength.

He’s matched well with the warm, pert Monaghan, who can play a nice girl with grit and refreshing brusqueness. But the film barely tests their chemistry.

Without the openings for personality that Caruso found in “Disturbia,” he becomes one more engineer of jolts. He tries to take us inside the action by shooting the pileups partly from his heroes’ point of view, but he isn’t ruthless or disciplined enough to hold to their perspective.

This movie’s “money shots” include the shearing-of of a police car’s hard top. Classics in this genre knew how to balance our desire to be startled with our yen to solve a mystery ourselves. Too often, watching “Eagle Eye” is like seeing someone else crack a jigsaw puzzle. And if it confirms that its young star can carry a sprawling spectacle, it doesn’t help him flesh out his big-screen identity.

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