Disturbia
Rated: PG-13
It's hard to watch Disturbia and not just enjoy it for what it is rather than constantly comparing it to the classic 1954 Hitchcock film, Rear Window. Unless you've never seen Rear Window, in which case, Shia LeBeouf's suspense flick of a kid who’s stuck on house arrest and discovers that his neighor is a murderous psychopath (I suppose there aren't many other kinds of psychopaths), will probably provide a good time. LeBeouf plays Kale, a kid who’s still haunted by a brutal car crash in which he survived but his father died. As opposed to Jimmy Stewart's dilemma of being a photographer with a broken leg and no television, Kale is under house arrest with no iTunes and X-Box Live. I'm not making that up. For a kid that's under house arrest, Kale has it good. But apparently the distractions provided by television and the Internet aren't enough and Kale begins to see the secret lives of his suburban neighbors. While one of those stories involves the arrival of Ashley (Sarah Roemer), a new and sexy neighbor, another tale involves the ladykiller Mr. Turner, played by David Morse and never providing an iota of doubt that he's going to fuck your shit up. Even if you've never seen Rear Window, David Morse is just plain menacing. If David Morse fell on hard times and had to take a job as the guy inside the Goofy costume at Disneyland, you would still feel his meance. You’d get back from Disneyland and tell your friends "I don't know what it was, but Goofy freaked me the fuck out." The film makes a convincing segue from it's light teen summer story of the developing relationship between Kale and Ashley to the tight thriller involving Mr. Turner and when the film reaches its final act, it demonstrates that you don't need to have a hard-R rating to deliver some genuine scares and intense thrills. You just need David Morse. Also, director D.J. Caruso, despite his over-reliance on score to set the mood, deserves a lot of credit for his use of multiple film formats, from web-cams, camcorders, and TVs and utilizing this technology to build effecitve jump-scares and go beyond just the standard binoculars that allowed Stewart to peer into the secret life of his mischievous neighbor. While it's no Rear Window (and honestly, what ever will be?), Disturbia provides a painless filmgoing experience that will hopefully send some teens who were just looking for a fun film on a Friday night into the loving arms of Mr. Hitchcock's filmography. Words by |