Saturday, April 21, 2007

'Disturbia' is more gripping than you'd expect

After his father's death, Kale becomes sullen, withdrawn, and troubled -- so much so that he finds himself under a court-ordered sentence of house arrest. His mother, Julie, works night and day to support herself and her son, only to be met with indifference and lethargy. The walls of his house begin to close in on Kale. He becomes a voyeur as his interests turn outside the windows of his suburban home towards those of his neighbors, one of which Kale begins to suspect is a serial killer. But, are his suspicions merely the product of cabin fever and his overactive imagination?
The trailers make "Disturbia" look like an eye-rollingly awful Generation Y ripoff of "Rear Window." And, yeah, the new movie's plot is definitely, um, borrowed (and uncredited). But it's directed and acted with enough intelligence and texture to largely compensate for its lack of originality.
Shia LaBeouf plays teenager Kale, whom we meet on an idyllic fishing trip — a trip that ends with a sucker-punch calamity that jolts the story forward a year.
Formerly well-adjusted, Kale has changed into a sullen, guilt-stricken ghost of himself. He barely pays attention in school. Worse, he's developed a trigger temper that lands him in front of juvie court officials, who sentence him to a summer of electric-anklet house arrest. (It's the 21st century equivalent of the broken leg that kept James Stewart stuck at home spying on his neighbors in "Rear Window.")
It's a big, beautiful house, shared with his long-suffering mom (the good, somewhat underused Carrie-Anne Moss). But Kale is soon bored out of his skull watching "Cheaters" on TV or gluing Twinkies into a pointless sculpture. That is, until he takes interest in two specific neighbors — Mr. Turner (David Morse), who lives alone in a big house and mows his lawn obsessively, and Ashley (Sarah Roemer), the blond hottie who's just moved next door with her family.
Kale's attraction to Ashley is hormone-level simple; he trains his binoculars on her while she swims and sunbathes. As for Mr. Turner? Well, Kale is convinced that a young woman he saw entering the man's house one night never came back out. At least in one piece. And what's that story he keeps hearing on the news, the one about a missing woman who was last seen being picked up by someone in a 1960s Mustang?
Guess what Mr. Turner drives. ...
While Stewart had Grace Kelly and Thelma Ritter to carry out his investigation of the possible killer-across-the-way, Kale has geeky Asian classmate Ronnie (the amusing Aaron Yoo) on his team, and eventually Ashley, too (once he fesses up to and apologizes for his Peeping Tom ways).
They operate their stakeout with lots of gadgets, from cellphones to camcorders. But the story maintains its simple, ageless suspense.
It helps that the movie peppers its plot with shrewd observations on teen interaction — especially when Ashley visits Kale wearing a new 'do, and she finally has to sigh, "Did you even notice my hair?"
And when Kale finds out she's invited a lot of the school's popular kids to her house for a party, he snipes (with equal parts jealousy and hurt), "I just didn't think you would conform so fast."
There's also a clever dig at our paranoid, wiretapping times when Ashley suggests that they should back off and let Mr. Turner have his privacy. Kale protests, "Why does he want his privacy?"
A lot of the movie works because LaBeouf (of "Holes" and Michael Bay's upcoming "Transformers") is becoming a soulful, intelligent presence on-screen. He's beautifully matched in the is-he-or-isn't-he dance by Morse, with his head of aging-hippie hair and single earring. He's an actor with a well-oiled toggle switch between charming and sinister. (The weak link is Roemer, whose smug Ashley seems to love herself even more than Kale and Ronnie combined.)
As with a lot of thrillers, the setup is more interesting than the conclusion — which becomes a fairly standard if enjoyably brutal series of struggles, escapes and nerve-racking scenes of people creeping around spaces only serial killer Buffalo Bill could love.
One of its two screenwriters, Carl Ellsworth, wrote the refreshingly no-frills action flick "Red Eye." And, like that Hollywood thrill machine, "Disturbia" is more gripping than it has any right to be.

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