Shia saves the day...barely.

Rating: 4/10 (29 March 2008)

"Disturbia" is built around a clever idea -- let's update Alfred Hitchcock's brilliant "Rear Window" to modern day, center it around a troubled teen-aged boy and place it in a nice upscale neighborhood where the veneer of life is perfect but the reality is venal and vile. And the way the premise is set up IS clever. While driving home from a fantastic fishing trip with his dad, Kale Brecht has an accident that kills his father. Feeling responsible for it, he crashes into anger and withdrawal and winds up threatened with jail. To show his leniency, the judge instead sentences Kale to house arrest, to be monitored by an ankle bracelet he cannot remove and that sounds an alarm if he goes more than 100 feet from its relay system. To top it off, his mother cancels his electronic distractions -- video games, web servers, even cuts the cord to his TV -- so all he has to keep himself occupied is spying on his neighbors, one of whom is a beautiful new girl who loves to swim in a string bikini (any teen boy's fantasy)...and another of whom he slowly comes to believe is a serial killer from Texas (cliched but cool). Great set-up with lots of potential, right?
Too bad a "clever idea" doesn't always translate into a good movie. Of course, if would help if the script by Christopher B. Landon and Carl Ellsworth wasn't lazy (hero in trouble? let's have somebody show up to cause a distraction and save him) and didn't have holes in the plot so big the QE2 could sail through them (how does a kid with no internet privileges get hold of the original blueprints for a house?). Or if it actually had some basis in reality (the entire ending borders on the ludicrous and raises questions that cannot be answered). It would also help if D J Caruso had at least some semblance of style or ability to frame a sequence so it made sense instead of just "pointing and shooting and sometimes moving at the same time and let's make it work in editing" (which was nearly flawless -- the editing, I mean).
In fact, the one true saving grace in this all-too-typical-train-wreck-of-a-modern-thriller is Shia LaBeouf. He gives Kale a depth and humanity that is not earned by how he is written. He's the only reason I give this movie ANY stars. The one other actor who comes close to achieving this is Carrie-Anne Moss, as his mother, and that's in spite of her character being little more than a cypher. Aaron Yoo and Sarah Roemer do what they can with their one-note characters, and David Morse tries...he really tries...to keep from seeming too obvious -- but none of them can overcome the stupid writing (Syd Field 101, anyone?) and ham-fisted directing.
To top all this off -- not once, anywhere in the film or credits, is any acknowledgment made of Hitchcock's masterful filming of or John Michael Hayes' brilliant script for "Rear Window." To say that's poor manners is to be kind; to me, it only adds to my sense that today's "filmmakers" are so busy being lost in their own cleverness they're ignoring the fact that they have yet to achieve even one-percent of the ability of the filmmakers of the past...and refusing to acknowledge that they could learn wonders from them if they'd just stop and think and pay attention to reality. But that's the problem with failed movies like "Disturbia" -- the guys who made it DO think they know what's going on. And that, in and of itself, really is disturbing.