A few years back Hollywood saw a surge of ‘stealth remakes,’ movies that took their plots from previous films while keeping the fact that they were even remakes on the D.L. Think 2002’s Love Don’t Cost a Thing, which rewrote Can’t Buy Me Love for a new generation of teens, or 2005’s Guess Who, which dumbed down Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner to see if Ashton Kutcher was this generation’s Sideney Poitier (He wasn’t).
In the same tradition comes Disturbia, although instead of an ’80s teen comedy or a ’60s melodrama, it’s remaking an Alfred Hitchcock classic, and it doesn’t even bother giving screenplay credit to John Michael Hayes or Cornell Woolrich, who wrote 1954’s Rear Window, which Disturbia so closely resembles.
In Rear Window, Jimmy Stewart was a housebound photographer who fought cabin fever by spying on his neighbors, until he began to suspect one of them may be a murderer, and he recruited his friends to help him investigate. In Disturbia, Shia LaBeouf is a housebound teenager who fights cabin fever by spying on his neighbors, until he begins to suspect one of them may be a murderer, and he recruits his friends to help him investigate.
But maybe I’m reading too much into it; Disturbia does have a much younger cast, and is sexed up a bit with some PG voyeurism and lingering shots of Sarah Roemer’s bikini-clad ass.
In the opening scenes LaBeouf loses his father in a terrible (and well-staged) car accident, transforming him from a good son into a sullen teen who wears his hoodie’s hood in class and punches out his Spanish teacher. This offense gets him an ankle bracelet and a three-month sentence in his house, where his mother Carrie-Anne Moss (Trinity? Is that you?) cuts his cable and iTunes to further punish him for being so sullen.
He finds escapism in ‘reality television, without the television,’ using a pair of binoculars to watch the world outside. Lucky for him, he has one exciting neighborhood–teenage hottie Roemer, who apparently doesn’t believe in blinds, just moved next door, and another neighbor may just be a serial killer, something which bears further investigation.
With the aid of comic relief best friend Aaron Yoo and Roemer (whom, remarkably enough, finds LeBeouf’s character’s watching her do yoga and change clothes through binoculars more endearing than creepy), he sets out to prove that creepy neighbor David Morse is the killer the news can’t shut up about.
LeBeouf is a gifted actor, and he manages to pull off both the angry, asshole teen routine at the beginning of the film and the more sympathetic business in the second half. As the suspected psychopath who begins wooing Moss, Morse mixes the unsettling middle-aged menace of Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter with the faux-cool doucheiness of Tim Robbin’s High Fidelity character.
Their quickly escalating rivalry is thrilling enough, and I give director D. J. Caruso (Two For The Money, Taking Lives) credit for managing to wring some suspense out of the film by not always having the most predictable thing happen at the most predictable time (For example, usually stalkers get slapped in the face, not made out with, when they’re caught) and keeping the plot holes from getting so big that they completely swallow the rest of the proceedings, as becomes an increasingly more likely danger as it strays from Rear Window-ishness to more standard serial killer movie clichés.
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