? Confined to house arrest after slugging his teacher out of displaced anger at losing his father, a teenager (Shia LaBeouf) fills his days spying on the neighbors, including the gal next door and, from another window, someone more sinister.
+ Taking a page from Hitchcock’s Rear Window, in which Jimmy Stewart suspects his neighbor has committed a murder, is a pretty good idea. Jimmy didn’t have the advantage of cell phones, or the disadvantage of an electronic ankle monitor, and the movie cleverly works technology into the story. The actors are likeable.
- What’s not clever is the paint-by-numbers ending, which delivers everything I expected and not much I’d hoped for, such as originality or plausibility. The apparent villain (David Morse) seems like a careless fool. And the psychological aspects of the Hitchcock masterpiece are absent, making the opening car-crash sequence seem like a cheap stunt. Although it’s the basis for the plotline, the father’s death never gets mentioned again.
= **1/4 If the cookie-cutter ending doesn’t bother you, the story moves along briskly, with some funny moments in between the suspenseful ones. But it was all setup, not much payoff.
IMDB link
reviewed 4/19/07
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