Intense Beginning turns mindless and clichéd

Rating: 4/10 (30 March 2008)

About 1/3 through Disturbia, the movie completely becomes clichéd poorly made teen slasher flick fare. It's too bad too since it began with such promise, the first 20 min or so which were pretty well done in drawing us in to what mightve been a good story. Unfortunately, the writers, editors, and movie-makers take the path well traveled or in this case VERY well traveled. They have a combustive type prologue setting up what could've been a great character fall-from-grace or look at house arrest or 'you-fill-in-the-blank', but no.... It degenerates into standard dumb predictable situations trying to pass as suspenseful. Any character insights or quirks are left on the back-burner or simply unimportant And then the movie screams teen angst/slasher flick , and finally "the girl-next-door film" pops up that we've seen 2 dozen times before for good measure. So the hard-earned setup is flatly disappointing. Completely dumbed down.