Eagle Eye (12A)Igor (PG)Free Jimmy (15)

It's based on an idea its executive producer, Steven Spielberg, had 12 years ago. What might happen, he wondered, if all the mobile phones, traffic lights and cash machines we have come to rely on were turned against us? A decade on, as that reliance has increased, the idea is even more relevant than it was in the 1990s – so relevant, indeed, that it was used last year in Die Hard 4.0. But despite the long gestation of Eagle Eye, none of the four credited screenwriters has worked out how to turn Spielberg's concept into a fully functional film. You get the impression that more and more plot contrivances were piled on with every script revision until the original idea was squashed flat.

The hero is a copy-shop drone played by Shia LaBeouf. (In case you ever forget how to spell him, think "Beowulf", then remove most of the consonants.) Considering that he's already been in Transformers and the recent Indiana Jones revival, LaBeouf seems to be Hollywood's new go-to guy for action blockbusters, even though he looks like John Cusack's sickly nephew. In an echo of Hitchcock's "innocent man" thrillers, specifically North by Northwest, LaBeouf is framed for terrorist offences, and forced to go on the run across America. The only way he can escape is to follow the instructions of a mystery woman who keeps calling him on his mobile phone. But his phone isn't the only gadget she has access to. This unseen Big Sister can manipulate anything electronic, from surveillance cameras and sat-nav devices to subway trains and construction cranes, so LaBeouf is never far from a piece of hardware which will attack him if he doesn't do what he's told. The irony of Eagle Eye's supposed nightmare scenario is that most of us are frustrated every day by faulty laptops and automated phone lines, so it's tempting to see Eagle Eye less as a cautionary tale about the terrifying ubiquity of technology than as a utopian fantasy set in a world where technology never crashes or asks you to re-enter your password.

For no other reason than to inject some feminine charm into the film, LaBeouf meets Michelle Monaghan, a single mother who's also in the Mystery Woman's thrall, and the pair of them are tracked by two government investigators, Billy Bob Thornton and Rosario Dawson, who have half a character trait between them. It's all a pretext for enough frenzied, destructive action to make The Bourne Ultimatum seem like a Bergman film. But the thrills you should get from the myriad collisions and explosions soon evaporate when you notice just how passive the nominal heroes are. Instead of trying to outwit their puppet-mistress, LaBeouf and Monaghan keep obeying her orders. And, since they have no notion of what they're doing or why, it's impossible for the viewer to care whether or not they succeed.

The other problem is that the so-called heroes have no power at all, and the Mystery Woman has too much. She can derail trains, steer cars and snap electricity wires anywhere in the country, all via instantaneous remote control, so why would she need to recruit two nobodies to help her out? Anyone hoping for an ingenious answer to that question will be dis-appointed, although anyone hoping for a phenomenally stupid answer will be only too pleased. Eagle Eye culminates in an assassination attempt so preposterous that it might have suited The Naked Gun or Get Smart, but not a thriller as portentous and humourless as this.

Igor is another film that takes a terrific idea and then overcomplicates it into oblivion. A computer animation populated by characters who might well have been torn out of Tim Burton's sketch pad, it revolves around a mad inventor's assistant (voiced by John Cusack) who's tired of skivvying for his master (voiced by John Cleese) and who dreams of being a crazed scientist himself. The story of a plucky little hunchback realising his ambitions could have made for a lovely cartoon, but Igor hops from that story to another one about rival scientists, then to one about a monster who wants to be an actress, and then to one about a conspiracy to dethrone the king. Like Bee Movie, it's a children's cartoon that most children won't be able to follow.

It could have been worse, though. Much, much worse. Norway's first CGI cartoon, and with any luck its last, Free Jimmy is a dingy, cheapo effort in which a circus elephant is fought over by hunters, dopeheads and animal liberationists. The relentless swearing, drug use, sex scenes and gore don't make it any less depressing. The bewildering thing is that Free Jimmy was adapted into English by Simon Pegg and has a voice cast of British luminaries, including David Tennant, members of The League of Gentlemen and Pegg himself. Presumably blackmail was involved.