A little run for your money

Rating: 7/10 (18 April 2007)

D.J. Caruso can draw you in, as he did with the phantasmagorical Salton Sea and the initially engaging police procedural, Taking Lives. Disturbia's premise is derivative -- it's a teenager version of Hitchcock's Rear Window -- but manages to seem fresh. The movie is set up with more detail about character than is usual with formulas for the genre. The paradox is that when you compare it with Hitchcock's more genteel world all that was necessary in the earlier film is a little dialogue, not a fishing scene or a violent car crash. The contrast shows how crude and brutal Hollywood movies are now, how much they have to labor to achieve their effects. Jimmy Stewart had a broken leg. We have to see Shia LaBeouf doing poorly in Spanish class, being pushed by the teacher, and then socking him and getting sentenced afterwards to house arrest.
This is good in a way. We've never seen a teenager confined to home for 90 days with an ankle sensor before. You can feel his frustration, his gorging on junk food, his trashing his room. And then the binoculars come out and he starts visually stalking the neighbors and finds a babe and a creep out there. It's fun to watch Kale (LaBoeuf) and his pal Ronnie (Aaron Yoo), who's a comic, skittish, loose canon kid, get excited watching Ashley (Sarah Roemer), the shapely new girl next door. Indeed Ashley is a dishy jailbait blend of Gwyneth Paltrow and Uma Thurman. It's cool how Ashley just walks into Kale's house one day and almost starts smooching with Kale right away, and Kale sneaks up behind her and smells her hair. All this updates the trapped detective genre with a vengeance and makes Rear Window look tame. But Hitchcock's movie develops a mystery through visual clues effectively because of Stewart's suave inertia. LaBoeuf is all over the place, and then when we get to the menace (because it's menace rather than mystery that comes), the movie hits us over the head with it, bombards us with loud "scary" booming music. By this time all that's been going on, straining to hold our attention above the sound of crunching popcorn, though its inventiveness has charm, also gets in the way of the suspense (which needs to be more obsessive and focused than this) and leaves you at the end sort of wondering if the bad guy really existed.
But we must give Caruso credit for both originality and pop instincts. Shia LaBoeuf may soon be the flavor of the month. He is without the complexity of a Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the pop sex appeal of a Justin Timberlake, or, to reach a bit, without a hint of the charisma of a River Phoenix, but as twenty-something movie "teenagers" go, he's got different, and for a mainstream filmmaker like Caruso, good, stuff. He's slightly humorous, yet angry and impulsive (he's a loose canon too, obviously; that must be why he and Ronnie are pals). What's distinctive about him is he's neutral without being uninteresting. LaBoeuf is a sort of twenty-something "teenage" Everyman.
What makes you realize you're in a formula picture is that loud music, with the booms and the little sound effects. Once it kicks in you're stuck with it for the duration, and it drums up stock scare responses so powerfully you're ready to jump at every shadow or moving object. Caruso has done a lot of television. Salton Sea's craziness was interesting till it meandered too long; it did have the virtue of being completely weird and pointless. Taking Lives, with a miscast Angelina Jolie and Ethan Hawke, still seemed intriguing and original for a while. This time with Disturbia Caruso carries you through to the end quite nicely if you don't expect too much.
The visual style here, the tech fun of cell phone camera hooked up to TV monitors with text messages saying "look at your TV" -- even the old ploy of hooking up loudspeakers out the window to disturb neighbors' pool party guests (surprisingly, with Minnie Ripperton) is engaging and up-to-date. But the use of grainy images to scare us because we don't know what they are backfires because the menace remains so vague it's just generic. You're beginning to find the whole movie becoming a blur. Throughout Disturbia -- a good name, that -- hinting at the seedy underbelly of the middle class and the confined teenager's frustration -- its virtues gradually turn into partial weaknesses. In the end it's just a little entertainment. It makes you care about its young hero a little, amuses you a little, scares you a little. Then it's over and you're back with a teenager who's exonerated himself, but still isn't really going anywhere, and an ending that's been completely rushed. There's no sense, as in Rear Window, of a tricky, threatening villain tracked down and stopped, or of getting to the bottom of a mystery that had come to intrigue us.
Still, nice work by nearly all the actors, and a great role for rising star LaBeouf, who might turn out to be interesting as well as typical if he gets some good roles.