A disturbing remake of a Hitchcock masterpiece

Rating: 5/10 (13 April 2007)

In Disturbia, Kale (Shia LaBeouf) is placed under house arrest because he got into a fight with his Spanish teacher. It is one of many problems Kale has had at school lately, and a judge orders him to the house arrest, saying "I just gave you a break Kale, don't test me." Life hasn't been easy for Kale, while on a fishing trip, he was in a terrible car accident that ended up killing his father, which spiraled the normal teenage boy Kale into his rebellious ways. On his computer, Kale has a screen saver that reads "LET ME OUT!" He can't go anywhere or do anything outside of his home, he feels trapped. After a while, I felt trapped as well, trapped into another poorly executed remake and a bad excuse of a film. Disturbia is an obvious remake of Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 masterpiece Rear Window. There are differences, yes, some minor, for example Disturbia follows a teenage delinquent who has nothing better to do but spy on the neighbors. Rear Window follows a successful photographer with a broken leg who can't do anything, so he passes the time by observing his neighbors. His observing turns to spying once he believes he sees a murder take place.
The minor differences, many like the one I just pointed out, are not the reason why Disturbia fails at what it promises, it is the major differences. Hitchcock was a master filmmaker, he would have been able to tell a story without dialogue and only with reactions to situations if he wanted to, which is called pure cinema. Rear Window is the epitome of Hitchcock's pure cinema, Disturbia differs in telling us what is going on at every moment, simply put, these types of films do not trust audience's enough today as opposed to the '50's. Another major and very upsetting difference is the setting of the film. Rear Window never left the apartment of it's protagonist, which created it's suspense because like the films protagonist, the audience could do nothing about the situation, except try to make people believe that a neighbor is committing a murder. Disturbia, however, takes Kale and the audience out of his room numerous times and into the outside world, the world that Kale is not supposed to enter.
Do film studios really distrust audiences this much? Why do many of these films have to rely on cheap thrills that are seen time and time again, such as the camera creeping up behind the protagonist when he is in a dark corner of the room? Disturbia is a predictable and stale excuse for a thriller. It is troubling when films follow formulas by the letter and do nothing to advance a genre such as thrillers. I would have enjoyed the film much more if Disturbia had been a complete remake of Rear Window, never leaving Kale's room, and us only seeing glimpses of the supposed murderer. There is also a poor excuse for the Grace Kelly character from Rear Window in Ashley (Sara Roemer). I am not saying Roemer is an unattractive young woman, not many can be as attractive as Grace Kelly was, but her character is not given that same depth or meaning as Grace Kelly's Lisa in Rear Window. The Ashley character is a hole filler, we are not given enough time to care for her, because for the first half of the film we only see her from a distance, in her pool, and on the roof of her house reading.
Out of all the negatives in Disturbia, there emerges one slight positive. Shia LaBeouf gives a good performance as Kale. LaBeouf is mainly known from his time on the Disney television series Even Stevens, he's grown up now, and LaBeouf is slowly evolving into a fine young actor, his only problem is that he is not picking good films to star in. He gave a fine performance in Bobby last year, however, that film was simply awful. LaBeouf reminds me of a young Jimmy Stewart, he has the look of a normal teenager that a lot of teens can identify with. Interesting how he is cast in the role Jimmy Stewart had in Rear Window. The problem with LaBeouf's character, however is that he comes off as a peeping tom, constantly spying on Ashley, at one point setting his phone alarm to go off when she is doing yoga. LaBeouf is able to give the character some depth, however, and make watching the character at least a little tolerable.
Overall, Disturbia is simply another throwaway thriller that does not deliver what it promises. There are currently rumors flying that another of Hitchcock's greatest films, The Birds, is in talks of being remade. By my count, that would be the third film of Hitchcock's remade for mainstream theaters, with 1998's Psycho and Disturbia being the first two. Although sometimes I think remakes are a good idea, because hopefully they would get audiences intrigued to see the original, but in the case of Hitchcock's library of films, I have to ask, no, more like beg, that movie studios do not remake any more of Hitchcock's films. His films were perfect when they were made, if anything, draw ideas from them for a new film; please, don't dwindle the great director's finest works into this garbage.