Terrible, tame teen Rear Window remake.

Rating: 2/10 (4 May 2010)

Disturbia starts as teenager Kale (Shia LaBeouf) & his father are driving home & are involved in a car accident in which Kale's father is killed. One year later & Kale is provoked in Spanish class by his teacher (Rene Rivera) & punches him, a Judge sentences Kale to three month house arrest. While at home Kale becomes bored & starts spying on his neighbours, he sees one named Robert Turner (David Morse) act suspiciously & after hearing about missing local girls on the news Kale becomes convinced that his neighbour is a serial killer as Turner owns the exact same type of classic car seen driving away from one crime scene. Kale & his friends continue to spy on Turner but he soon realises that he is being watched & isn't happy about it at all...
Directed by D.J. Caruso I have to say right away that I thought this was total crap & a huge disappointment, Disturbia could have been great & used our obsession with knowing other's business to great effect but all the potential is wasted in a crap film of little merit. The script is an obvious rip-off of Hitchcock's classic Rear Window (1954) & the owners of the original short story that inspired Raer Window sued Universal & SKG for copyright infringement, the basic plot are exactly the same in both as a house bound character who starts spying on his neighbours thinks he has found a murderer. In Disturbia (a combination of the words disturbing & suburbia which is as clever as the film ever gets) the themes & ideas are updated a bit, instead of someone recovering from a broken leg here it's a teen under house arrest & he starts spying on his good looking blonde neighbour & the use of mobile phones, camcorders & computers plants the story in modern times although it is still the same story. There are no surprises at all, the final half an hour makes no sense & I can't believe how predictable it is, where was the suspense & ambiguity? Why is everything so straight forward & why does it all play out exactly as we expect it too? Why not even an attempt at a twist in the story? The films attempts to convey paranoia, suspicion & voyeurism are pathetic, for a thriller there are zero thrills & it doesn't really work as a horror film either as it's pretty tame & simply not dark enough until the final twenty minutes although there's plenty of boring soap opera style teen angst dramatics that I found rather embarrassing to watch with romance, trust, grief & friendship all getting the clichéd American teen treatment. At over 100 minutes it's slow, the assumptions that Kale makes to decide that Turner is a serial killer are ridiculous, why doesn't Turner just close the curtains? Why is he so open about what he does, it's surprising he hasn't been caught before. Once Turner know's he's being spied on why doesn't he get rid of the evidence or just get the hell out of there?
I also really dislike the look & feel of Disturbia, once again very wealthy upper class Americans who never seem to have to work or have any money worries as the big houses & expensive car & possessions are way beyond the average person & it's hard to relate to these people at times. This is not the real world & doesn't come close to depicting it. Disturbia is just full of wealthy Americans who never seem to care about anything meaningful. With a family friendly PG rating there's no real nudity or violence here & it's very tame. Apparently Disturbia was shot in two different cities, although Kale & Turner's homes are meant to be on the same street next door to each other in real life they were actually located in two different cities miles apart. There's a considerable lack of tension as the film is so slow & once Turner is exposed as a killer all logic goes out of the window.
With a supposed budget of about $20,000,000 I can't really see where all that money went really, filmed in California it looks nice enough but forgettable with a total lack of style or imagination. The acting is OK at best, I didn't like anyone here to be honest or their performance.
Disturbia is a film that I hated, I thought it was a boring, predictable & tame Rear Window copy that failed to deliver on it's premise of paranoia & voyeurism in any meaningful way. A slow boring mess of a script with a lack of logic or sense doesn't help either, a not very thrilling thriller.