‘Disturbia’ predictable spy game

by Tim Williams

Wednesday, April 18, 2007 00:00

It's a sign of the times that a movie can end with the resonant iamb that has wormed its way into the rhythms of the languages of Milton, Shakespeare and the Bible: YouTube.

That's not a spoiler.

In fact, it would be hard to spoil a single element of "Disturbia" for anyone who has seen an episode of "Desperate Housewives" and "Generic Thriller X," and/or glanced at the yellowed back cover of a Nancy Drew book. Yes, for all its pretenses of updating (again) Alfred Hitchcock's voyeur classic "Rear Window" for an age where movies made by bored suburban teens are often as popular as the multimillion-dollar ones pandered to them, "Disturbia" leaves out everything relevant from its prototype about the caged modern animal. It instead fills out its time with quaint teen-hero antics and admittedly impressive action sequences.

From the opening scene, in which father and would-be hero son Kale (Shia LaBeouf, "Bobby") drink Coke from glass bottles in some impossibly deserted river valley and banter about father-son moments during their father-son moment, "Disturbia" grates. The film refuses, like its main character's contrived house-arresting ankle bracelet, to stray an inch outside the safe zone of the familiar, playing out like a checklist of thriller and teen comedy clichés.

Kale finds himself, like James Stewart's character in "Rear Window," with the opportunity to discover the inner workings of his seemingly ordinary neighborhood, but he chooses to spend most of it with comic-relief sidekick Ronnie (Aaron Yoo, "The Bedford Diaries"), watching urban-flight refugee Ashley (Sarah Roemer, "The Grudge 2") adjust her swimsuit. This is the single greatest failing of the movie — the voyeurism doesn't develop any of the characters.

"Rear Window" sets the audience at unease by slowly revealing the intimate lives of the onlooker's objects. In "Disturbia," however, binocular fetishing is the sincerest form of flattery, and Kale soon wins Ashley's heart, after an impassioned speech at a jealousy-ridden house party about how she is really deep because she "reads books, substantial books" and looks at herself sadly in the mirror. Sarah Roemer is sufficiently coy and vulnerable as the suburban princess, but even her many smirk variations can't save lines such as "That's either the creepiest, or the sweetest thing I've ever heard."

David Morse's ("House M.D.") character, Mr. Turner, suffers the most from the lazy screenwriting. He broods about the film without ever establishing a motivation for playing the antagonist to Kale's paranoia. Director D.J. Caruso ("Two for the Money") pulls out all the cheap tricks to make viewers shift in their seats at Turner's presence (sudden entrances, camera fumbling that centers on his face in the window staring back, tension cut with literal knives). But all the slow, soft-spoken monologues attempting to establish some vague theme of "suburban paranoia" and "disappearing privacy" bear instead an inspiring admiration of a Hannibal-like intelligence, and he leaves no clues to engage the viewer in solving the mystery.

The cinematography also fails to live up to its predecessor, doing little more framing with the neighborhood than to contrast Kale's darkened lookout with the perpetually sunny neighborhood, and make Kale's many impossible gadgets look sufficiently cool. (All-purpose 9-volt battery? Check. Magic image-zooming Mac to uncover crucial evidence? Check. Subsequent struggle over single copy of said evidence? Check.) There is no real attempt to parallel the movie viewer with the voyeurs; we see much through Kale's eyes, but nothing that shocks or unsettles in prying into others' private lives.

Caruso's action scenes fare much better, with a brutal physicality reminiscent of "The Bourne Identity" and the series "The Shield," of which he has directed several episodes. While the scenes are not especially creative, the filmmakers do find ways of turning mundane household objects into deadly weapons. At times, this borders on a "Home Alone"-esque absurdity, but a dark sense of humor certainly could have helped "Disturbia." The film also features a clever spoof on Chekhov's smoking gun maxim (If a gun is shown in the first act, it must be fired in the third) that should have been extended to the rest of its slavish devotion to genre formula.

But if completely predictable, "Disturbia" at least avoids the opposite trap of suspense plots — hopeless convolution — and delivers a brainless but competent thriller. Honestly, though, I'd rather watch "Rear Window" again, or at least a cheerfully vapid parody of it on YouTube.

Grade: 2 out of 5