Disturbia

I watched Disturbia last night. It’s not as good as Suburbia but its not as bad as that band, Disturbed. This film, helmed by D.J. Caruso (I like how he uses initials instead of a first name…I had a friend in elementary school who went by B.J.—he’s probably changed that by now), is supposedly a modern re-telling of the Hitchcock classic, Rear Window. I won’t make any attempt in my review to compare the two films. Disturbia does not deserve the comparison.

Basic Plot: The film opens with 17 year-old Kale (Shia LaBeouf) fly-fishing with his dad. They bond. On their way home, they get in a horrific car accident. Kale’s dad dies at the scene. Jump ahead a few months. Kale is in Spanish class. He’s sleeping during lecture; his father’s death has him in the grips of depression. Consequently, he lacks motivation. The teacher calls him on his behavior and says something about how Kale’s dad would be disappointed. Ergo, Kale punches his teacher in the face. A judge sentences Kale to three months of house-arrest for assault. He has to wear an ankle transmitter that notifies the police anytime he leaves the boundaries of his property.

It’s summer vacation and Kale is a bored, spoiled kid. Enter the product placement: He has an Xbox 360 and Xbox Live and an iPod and iTunes and a Playstation Portable. His mother (Carrie-Anne Moss) disconnects his Xbox Live and his iTunes account, so he suddenly claims that has nothing to do (he can’t read a book or something…pop culture wouldn’t allow it). He decides to do what any teenage kid would do in this situation; he spies on his neighbors using some binoculars. He owns lots of cool pairs of binoculars and some video cameras and tons of monitors and computers and TV’s and stuff. He becomes a Peeping Tom.

A new family moves in next door. They have a hot daughter named Ashley (Sarah Roemer) who likes to take her clothes off with the window shades open and likes to wear bikinis and enjoys sitting on her roof and reading (she reads, but she’s a girl, so it’s acceptable). Kale spies on her a lot, but he’s sincere about it. See, he’s not a stalker because he’s in love with her. This movie teaches that it’s okay to be a Peeping Tom if you’re under house-arrest and you’re bored of playing Xbox. I’m surprised there wasn’t a sub-plot where Kale finds Ashley’s myspace page and stalks her there, as well. This would have worked because you know she has a myspace page and posts pictures of herself in her bikini and blogs about how unfair it is that her parents made the family move from the city to the suburbs to put a damper on her dad’s infidelities. Pretty soon, Ashley intuits Kale’s voyeuristic behavior and goes over to his house to meet him. Kale and his best friend, annoying friend/sidekick boy (I don’t care who this actor is or what his character’s name is…that would give him too much credit for this role), awkwardly interact with her and she joins them in their nerdy fun. They end up spying on the neighbors together. They believe that their neighbor, Mr. Turner (David Morse), is a serial killer. They conclude this based on a few news reports about some missing girls and a dented Ford Mustang. It’s not like this is a big secret in the film. His fucking earring gives him away.

Our heroes spy on Turner and videotape his nightly activities and try to break into his car and sneak into his garage and they think they are being sly, but he knows…he knows, and he starts messing with them and he befriends Kale’s mom and he sneaks up on Ashley who has been following him around a store and he gets in her car and tells her in a whispery voice, while touching her hand and brushing up against her breast, that he likes his privacy and that he is watching them and meanwhile sidekick boy breaks into his car to get his garage door code so they can investigate a plastic garbage bag that they think contains human remains but it's only a deer and the retard accidentally leaves his cell phone in the car and later gets trapped in Turner's garage when he tries to retrieve his phone and Kale’s mom gets abducted and locked somewhere in Turner's house and Kale goes inside to find her and things start to get really intense and the editing gets choppier and choppier and the music gets louder and louder and the scenes get darker and darker until I can’t tell who is stalking whom and who is stabbing whom and who is falling in the water underneath the basement of the secret room of Mr. Turner’s house or who gets killed or who lives and why...and then things slow down again and it turns out that evil is vanquished and true love reigns, yes, the love between a boy stalker and his stalkee and all is well in Disturbia as annoying-sidekick boy videotapes the new lovers kissing and proclaims that the video will be the most popular youtube download in history.

It’s difficult for me to say that this is a bad movie. I didn’t like it, but I can understand its appeal. It fits quite nicely into the teen horror-thriller category. It performed well at the box-office because it brought in its target audience. I would have preferred an R-rated version of the film; one that wasn’t afraid to show a little gore or some boobies. It seemed to me that the climax of this film was edited to remove shots that might have warranted an R-rating. Maybe that’s why it was so difficult to follow the action. Director Caruso’s three previous movies, Two For The Money, Taking Lives, and The Salton Sea, are all R-rated films. Maybe he had a hard time shooting for a PG-13 audience. Whatever the reason, the poor editing of the climax is inexcusable. That’s all.