There's a funny thing you'll notice about this film. Its been in release around the world and has done pretty poorly both in reaction and at the box-office. But when it finally hit the States, reaction from there has been pretty good - especially from the public. Why is that? Well it seems to be a facet of American culture. Being Australian I cannot comment on what its like to look at American culture from the inside, but I most certainly am in a position to look at it from the outside and judge it in relation to the rest of the world. If you believe what you see on Oprah and various shows, American culture has always thought itself immune to terrorism - that was until this decade when incidents such as the World Trade Centre & Oklahoma City bombings changed that. Those patriotic people who were thoroughly shocked to the core by those events and how they could happen on American soil, they'll find this film a chilling piece of work. As for the rest of us who have more commonsense & cynicism about the world and the events happening around us, this is a relatively slow & mundane paranoia drama thriller saved only by a shocking twist ending.
In fact with the exception of a great flashback FBI raid, the first 70 minutes or so is one of the weaker films I've seen this year. It has been such a long time since a really good paranoia flick has come along, the kind which makes you look over your shoulder and check every corner, and this ain't it. Other recent paranoia movies have done just as bad as this, but some such as "Enemy of the State" and "The Siege" worked as films because the 'paranoia' aspect was just an add-on to their core themes of being an action thriller and a political drama respectively. Ehren Kruger's script shoves the paranoia theme right into the central core of the story by using that old chestnut of an idea "what if your neighbours were terrorists". Kruger's writing is solid, but the central idea doesn't work. Back in the 50's or 60's when families were "Leave it to Beaver" kind of happy and neighbours were all nice to each other - this would've been a shocking concept. Today most people don't know or don't trust their neighbours anyway so the idea isn't much of a stretch - and seems just a rehash of Communism paranoia movies.
But the main faults in this movie isn't the story - its the directing and casting/characters where the problems can be found. Director Mark Pellington can do action sequences well as demonstrated in a car chase, but the rest of the movie makes him seem like an Alex Proyas wannabe - everything is shot in half light and extreme shadows. The key to making this thriller work is that while the neighbours themselves are unusual, everything else about the neighbourhood should be pretty much like normal life to lull us into believing this could happen anywhere. But with settings that are so dark and barren all the time we never get to feel like this is a pretty much normal neighbourhood anyhow. On the casting front Joan Cusack is the only real watchable one. She's always great and is in the role that suits her best - a seemingly 100% sweet woman which masks a darker layer to her personality underneath.
Tim Robbins plays the seemingly eternally-calm villain who works as a baddie because of his low-key subtlety, but also fails as there's no real convincing motives for his actions and what ones he does have are so vague they seem an afterthought. Jeff Bridges however is the big disappointment of the film, both in acting and character-wise. This is the guy who we're supposed to be rallying behind and wanting to expose the bad guys. Instead we get perhaps the most annoyning character in recent cinema (except maybe Jar Jar Binks) - he shouts constantly, his family scenes aren't convincing, he's way too nosy, and frankly he's an idiot. He's smart enough to teach courses in terrorism, yet he's so dumb that when he goes into the neighbour's house to pretend to make a call - he takes a cell phone in with him.
It's the kind of film where the first three-quarters are total shit, but the last quarter rocks so you walk out thinking that was good. But when you look at the whole film in perspective again, its an OK movie at best. If your an American suburbanite whose blissfully unaware of the events in the world around you, or if your a fan of paranoia thrillers then you'll likely enjoy it. For the rest of us, don't even bother - there's much better paranoia movies out there.
