“Panic Room” is not a bad movie.
It’s a suspenseful thriller with some moments of extremely high drama. But overall, it’s just an easy to forget, predictable film. If it were just another trite kidnapper flick made by a group of talentless hacks looking to make money, then “Panic Room” may have been considered a decent attempt. However, the fact that the film is made by visionary “Fight Club” director David Fincher and stars Jodie Foster (“Silence of the Lambs”) makes its mediocrity inexcusable.
The eye candy visuals and directorial triumphs in “Fight Club” proved Fincher’s talent for manipulating the senses. That film provided running social commentary while simultaneously being completely disturbing and damn hilarious.
“Panic Room” provides none of these things. It takes a lazy stab at cultural relevancy by dwelling on the fact that an increasingly violent world has led paranoid rich people to take nearly insane measures in home security.
We’ve always known that the more you have, the more you have to lose. “Panic Room” is only disturbing in the fact that it tries to be completely realistic and then randomly suspends that reality periodically for the sake of plot advancement and hopes that you won’t notice.
Meg Altman (Foster) moves into a sprawling, three-story townhouse in Manhattan with her little bratty daughter, Sarah (Kristen Stewart, “The Safety of Objects”). In the master bedroom, the previous owner had installed a panic room, a steel closet with a buried phone line and television monitors. There are some provisions and an air duct. The idea is that if intruders enter your home and somehow avoid setting off your security system, you can call the police and camp out safely while you wait for them to come.
Of course, immediately upon arriving at the new house, Meg dismisses the panic room as ludicrous and doesn’t bother to set it up. She also dismisses the security system as just as ludicrous and disables that as well. Any one with half a brain living in a mansion of that size in New York City would realistically take security very seriously.
Oh, but then there would be no movie. So imagine their chagrin when Meg and Sarah find themselves locked up in the room helplessly when three intruders do indeed break into the house.
The robbers, by the way, neatly fit into the archetypal robber roles. There’s Burnham (Forest Whitaker, “The Crying Game”), the sympathetic, kind-hearted one who needs the money but doesn’t want to hurt anyone; Junior (Jared Leto, “Requiem for a Dream”) the hot-headed, young and inexperienced one; and “Raoul,” the bad egg, who is played very creepily by country-singer Dwight Yoakam.
In Fincher’s defense, it’s not really his fault the movie is so dry because the story itself is flawed. These characters fluctuate between imbeciles and MacGuyver, and everything in the universe goes wrong to avert their quest for safety.
Fincher occasionally pulls off a visual magic trick, but nothing remarkable. Then again, what does he really have to work with?
He has a handful of talented actors sitting in a room and another handful trying to get in.
If you are going to pay $7.50 to hang out in the “Panic Room” with Foster and Fincher, just know that the ride is not all it’s cracked up to be.
