With a different script, director and cast, this film would have been good...

Rating: 3/10 (10 April 2007)

If you can't tell by my summary line, there really wasn't much saving this film. I got free passes to see Disturbia and was actually looking forward to it. I'm a huge fan of Rear Window (which this film borrows from liberally, substituting a rabbit for the dog that dug in the killer's garden in Rear Window) and find the whole dramatic content of voyeuristic thrillers to be full of possibilities. Unfortunately, Disturbia is flawed in every regards, from plot lines that are nothing more than a slapping together of ideas, to painful to listen to dialog, to direction that is laughable at best, to both poor performances and great actors poorly utilized. This film has it all.
Right from the word go I had a bad feeling about this movie. Matt Craven is a solid performer, but it appeared from the opening sequence that the director didn't know how to use him in the opening scene. This set the stage for Shia LaBeouf who simply could not carry this film. His performance was, simply put, inconsistent and all over the place. Maybe he gives an accurate depiction of how modern teenagers act (and with access to more techno gadgets than Neo in the Matrix) but it doesn't mean that it is interesting to watch or even good drama. In any good performance there has to be a sense that we are looking at the same character in every scene with subtle nuances that show how the character developed. With LaBeouf's performance, it was as if he was a completely different person every five minutes with no sense of connection to the rest of the film.
The dialog went from stale, to boring, to laughably bad to downright insulting of one's intelligence in no time flat. Mix this with a villain -- played by the always excellent David Morse -- who seems to know everybody and show up everywhere and you end up with more of a farce than a serious suspense film. One shot made him look like Michael Myers from Halloween, and by that point they might as well have made this a slasher film because all of the intelligent suspense aspects of the film had already been thrown out the window. And that is very disappointing considering how much respect I have for David Morse as an actor. It was painful for me to watch him have to suffer through the indignities that is this film.
The ending of the film gave the impression that the writers and director had finally given up all hope of making any sense and devolved into a monster on the run project. All reality is thrown out the window as injuries that would kill any normal person become minor inconveniences, law enforcement procedure is tossed aside for happy Hollywood sentiment, and the final two minutes are so laughably bad that one has to wonder both who approved this film and what mafia Don it was that director D.J. Caruso insulted to land this gig.
Perhaps my only lucky break of the night in seeing this was that the projectionist at the theater I was at screwed up the framing half-way through so that the boom mics were present in every shot in the last half of the film. At least that gave the night some enjoyment. However, I would not recommend this film to anybody when there are many more voyeuristic thrillers (did I mention Rear Window) out there that are far better in every regards.