What's wrong with me?
Why do I feel like this?
I'm going crazy now.
A
friend recommended this to me. I can't remember who it was exactly, but
whoever you are; shame on you. This is basically just 'Rear Window'
except instead of a photographer it's 'Malcolm in the Middle'/Indiana
Jones Jr./Transformers Guy/Just Do It, and instead of a cast he's got a
trendy new ankle bracelet.
Throw on your brake lights, we're in the city of wonder.
Ain't gon' play nice, watch out you might just go under.
Better think twice, your train of thought will be altered.
So if you must falter be wise.
It's not all bad: LaBeouf does as well as ever (which I maintain to be pretty well) and David Morse plays a convincingly disturbing* serial killer.
The rest of the cast is meh though to be honest, I mean the mum is
alright but Beoufy's best pal and prospective girl are both... just...
terrible. If you want to do teenagers right, watch 'The Inbetweeners',
people, and NOT the American one**.
The will-he won't-he (murder someone) is done pretty well, though the suspense tends to be cut up a little by the love interest storyline and the flaming bag of turds kid's storyline. The result is that the pacing is very stop-start and meandering, giving the impression that it's for an an audience that struggles to focus on any one thing for more than 20 minutes. Then the movie comes to its conclusion and we see that the murderer has already killed countless other people who are all rotting in his watery basement, and I was sort of like "oh... OK."
I mean it has decent shock value, in that it turns out that this guy is way worse than we all thought, and there are bodies everywhere so ew,
but it feels very added on and kind of cheapens the murders we've seen
him commit on screen. At first someone dying here is a big deal, but suddenly it's been happening all over the place so I don't care as much.
Your mind's in disturbia, it's like the darkness is the light.
Disturbia, am I scaring you tonight?
Disturbia, ain't used to what you like.
Disturbia.
Disturbia...
I'm
probably being too harsh on a film likely made more to be simple,
forgettable entertainment more than to pay homage to a classic in a
coherent way though, but my score stands. Oh yeah, and in case you
hadn't already guessed, I couldn't get the Rihanna song out of my head the whole time while writing this, which was embarrassingly enjoyable.
*I think caps are far too often used, I'm going back to italics.
**Wow
two of these on my first time using them? I must be tripping. Anyway,
the American 'Inbetweeners' is shit, don't watch it. In fact I've never
seen a North American or Australian version of a British show that's
been even tolerable before, and yes I have seen 'The Office'. Stick to
laugh tracks and explosions.
Yeah,
I don't think these footnotes are really working for me here. I'm going
to stick to the long rambling brackets that ruin the flow of the
review, and leave the footnotes to Terry Pratchett novels. Call this a
one time bit; it's the last time you'll be seeing them, unless I forget
all about this and try it out again in a few years or something (which
is fairly likely).
Bum bum be-dum bum bum be-dum bum.
Bum bum be-dum bum bum be-dum bum.
Bum bum be-dum bum bum be-dum bum.
Bum bum be-dum bum bum be-dum bum.
etc.
Disturbia: 33.5