Slow start, dumb finish

Rating: 6/10 (2 February 2008)

Kyle is under house arrest, so he spies on his neighbors to pass the time. He suspects that one of his neighbors is a killer.
This took about an hour of setting up the situation before the action started. There was about 15 minutes of genuine suspense, when the kids were following Mr. Turner at the hardware store. A lot of the action at the climax was lit very poorly, and I couldn't tell what was happening. Thankfully, I was able to guess, because this movie stole ideas from at least two other good movies.
I can imagine the writers and producers sitting around a conference table, thinking, "We should remake "Rear Window", but we should change enough of it so people won't think it's a remake". So they changed the Jimmy Stewart character from a photographer to a teenager. Then they changed the reason he couldn't leave his house -- Jimmy Stewart broke his leg, this kid was under house arrest. The Grace Kelly character was already Jimmy's girlfriend, but in this nonsense our hero meets the girl and she falls in love with him! Only in the movies, folks.
But then the writers must have thought, "Raymond Burr was creepy in "Rear Window", but we should update this film to have the villain more like a villain from "Silence of the Lambs"." The house they gave the villain had all these secret passages, and what looked like an operating room, and a pit filled with water so the bad guy can dump the bodies. How big was this house, anyway? How could he fit an operating room in it? This house is in the suburbs, yet it just kept going and going and going.
Disturbia is a silly trifle of a film, not worth your time, and certainly not worth mine.