Cracked Rear View
Transparent "Disturbia"- Old Property, Low Rent. (Film Review)
by Michael Sean McGowan
The Upside: A few glimmers of wit.
The Downside: It's about as complex and unpredictable as the alphabet.
If someone, for some reason, had the bright idea of creating a visual Cliff Notes for Rear Window, the result would probably look a lot like Disturbia. Both feature protagonists who, for one reason or another, are bound within four walls and take to snooping on their neighborhood as a way to dispel the cabin fever and discover evidence of sinister goings-on. I don't have anything against the idea of a modern film cribbing a little from Hitchcock's seminal 1954 movie- in fact, there's something fairly cool about the idea of evolving Jimmy Stewart's (mostly) harmless voyeurism into an age in which every symbol-toy or gadget of our society (cell phones, camcorders), can become a tool to commit random acts of surveillance on each other. There's a lot of subversive potential in Disturbia, and like a designated hitter with a hangover, it bats nearly zero in this regard.
People who know movies get antsy over "spoilers," those little details that can leak out and ruin the surprises in a movie. Call me crazy, but you're not going to see the term "spoiler warning" used much in reference with Disturbia, because there are no spoilers, no surprises, just a thriller that wants to program our thrills for us by translating and spelling out our feelings of mystery and dread like subtitles.
Kale Brecht is slapped with a three-month house arrest sentence after a school altercation. Pinned-down by an electronic ankle bracelet that promises to land him in the slammer if he ventures away from home, Kale deals with the sudden lack of an outside world (as well as no Xbox or iTunes) by spying on his neighbors, residents of a soap-opera utopia where nobody has any morals- or any compulsion to draw the curtains. Kale divides his peep-show time between the underage goddess who's just moved in next door (Sarah Roemer) and the creepy-weird solitary bachelor (that God among character actors, David Morse) who hauls strange-looking sacks to and fro at all hours.
And it just so happens women around town have started vanishing into thin air. Coincidence...?
If the fact that Disturbia is an unofficial remake of Rear Window isn't a strike against it, then director D.J. Caruso (Taking Lives) shouldn't be surprised at the attempts to compare the two. What's most lamentable is that for a director who runs so much from the Hitchcock playbook as Caruso does here, there is little visible evidence of the Master's sly and mischievous workmanship. Rear Window, ironically, remains one of the great suspense movies of all times because it didn't feel like a suspense film. When Stewart's Jefferies thinks he's witnessed a man murder his wife, the certainty is tainted by the fact that every turn of the plot plays doppelgangers of suspicion and innocence against each other. Each clue could be damning, or have a logical explanation. What Stewart may have seen could be a crime, or perhaps he's invented one out of his bored and manifest mind.
If this had been the approach Disturbia had taken, this would have been a much better review to a much better movie that didn't feel the need to hand-hold its audiences through its twist-free maze. But no, Disturbia in its undemanding mediocrity has no patience for understatement. Every trace of possible wrong-doing is one-sided and blunt. Everything from the oppressive "this is a scary moment" score to even how Morse is boxed into performing like a less-than-charming Hannibal Lecter after a lobotomy signals a need to dress every development or revelation, whether of the true or red herring variety, with unmistakable neon. Some movies are a little too forward about where they are going. Disturbia spells it out in large, moody letters- and then repeats it, just in case you missed it the first time.
And it isn't as if there wasn't anything to build on. LaBeouf, that here-and-there name who has flown below the radar since his breakthrough in 2003's underrated hit Holes, seems to be the only one on-par. His Kale Brecht stands a few yards beyond a typical sub-adult in another sub-adult bloodletting potboiler- he's tactile, real in the way his underlying decency forms neat right angles with a frustrated petulance. It's this definition of character that gives Disturbia its few, precious boosts of witty sarcasm (I especially liked the ongoing war between Kale and a trio of neighborhood brats) and fun. But this isn't the heart of Disturbia, it's only its distraction since during most of the running time no one does anything resembling common sense in the real world, like why the girl next door would out-of-the-blue decide that joining in on a spy ring is actually a good idea, or why a serial killer meticulous enough to build a killing room under his basement would leave victim trophies sitting on his workbench. If a good mystery requires some real work to cut through its bramble, then the way Christopher Landon's script acts and operates on the obvious (news reports claim that the serial killer is driving a dented blue Mustang, so guess what shows up in Mr. Spooky Neighbor's driveway!), underscored and hit with exclamation marks, would be the equivalent of a welfare check.
Disturbia could have been a nifty little piece, if it wasn't for its total dearth of sophistication (don't even get me started on Kale's partner-in-paranoia who acts like he stumbled in from Half-Baked 2). No one but the most unforgiving would be going in expecting an accomplishment on the level of Hitchcock, but at least something within the Red Dragon corridor would have been appreciated. More realistically, Disturbia is more on equal footing with a Goosebumps book or Scooby-Doo Meets the Mad Serial Killer Next Door, a cartoonish blueprint where there are no hardened tests of deduction or supposition, no uncertainty of where it's going- just a bad guy and a couple of meddling kids. C
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