Disturbia (**1/4)

? 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.

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reviewed 4/19/07

Gridiron Gang (***1/4)

 ? Notwithstanding a title that makes it sounds like a comedy about a Pop Warner football league, this is a fairly serious movie about slightly older kids who’ve landed in a California juvenile detention center. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is a supervisor at the facility named Sean Porter who gets the idea that some teamwork would help rehabilitate the young men. The movie was coproduced by Lee Stanley, whose 1993 TV documentary was a basis for this feature. Xzibit plays a fellow probation officer and assistant coach.

+ Somehow it seems that the movies I see with the “based on a true story” tag rate a lot higher on the bullshit meter than many supposedly fictional ones. This is a happy exception. The movie concentrates on showing how a few key players transform themselves in the program, as well as Porter’s attempts to push the players without alienating them. Just as one touchdown won’t win a football game, the movie never implies that one key moment will make the difference in the players’ outlook, or even that every player will be rehabilitated. Though some prison officials express skepticism about the program, they’re not portrayed as uncaring buffoons. As Porter himself goes through many moods, the Rock continues to exhibit the range he showed in Be Cool. The could-have-been-corny parts with the coach’s dying mother even work fairly well, though I still suspected this storyline to have been made up.

- The basic plot is one you’ve seen many times, and on those terms the movie offers few surprises.

= ***1/4 Gridiron Gang overcomes the pitfalls of the underdog sports story by focusing on the personality of the coach, not unlike the otherwise different Miracle. It’s a cut above most movies of its type. The documentary clips at the end, which closely mirror scenes in the fiction version, are a nice touch.

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Step Up (**1/4)

? A rebellious white kid (Channing Tatum) at a black high school in Baltimore is forced into doing community service at a performing arts school. There, he shows off his hip-hop moves to an aspiring professional dancer played by Jenna Dewan, who also appeared in Take the Lead, another recent dance movie. R&B star Mario plays Tatum’s best friend.

+ Um, ex-model Tatum sure is handsome. There’s some decent soft hip hop on the soundtrack. The most interesting song, a blend of rap and orchestration that serves as the big showcase number, seems to be missing from the soundtrack album, though.

- Read the description and you know the story. Save the Last Dance is a more convincing movie covering the same ground. For a dance movie, the performances are too infrequent, and the romance generates little heat. The female characters, including Dewan’s, are all pretty trite. A couple of supporting characters have sudden transformations that aren’t that believable.

= **1/4 Although Step Up won’t win any awards, it might be worth seeking out if you enjoy the genre, as it at least doesn’t insult your intelligence.

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Stick it (**3/4)

The writer of Bring It On uses gymnastics instead of cheerleading as the theme, complete with a teen-rebel heroine, trash-talking competitors, photogenic routines, and an unpredictably ludicrous ending.

Cheesy title and all, I can’t lie. I liked this wholesome little teen-gymnastics movie. I was meaning to leave in the middle and watch the rest at a later showing, but I lost track of time and ended up 25 minutes late. It starts off with the heroine (Missy Peregrym) playing at being a badass with her skateboarding pals. After she damages some property, a judge sends her to a Texas gymnastics facility in lieu of juvie. This isn’t as outlandish as it seems, since it turns out she’d been an Olympic contender before notoriously flaming out in a competition, making her in the words of a fellow trainee, “Pariah Carey.” Yes, world-class gymnasts are a catty bunch. As the cattiest one notes, “It’s not called gym-nice-tics.” If those lines made you groan, you’ll be groaning a lot at Jessica Bendinger’s script.

Bendinger makes her directorial debut after penning such fluff as First Daughter and Aquamarine, as well as Bring It On. As with that cheerleading comedy, Stick It takes its subject (the gymnastics) relatively seriously while making the characters brash and semi-comical, with lots of teen-speak and/or gym speak. The rebellious Peregrym tells her fellow gymnasts to not do safe routines, but to “throw your best tricks.” If you’re “gonna eat mat, eat mat hard.” The main adult character is the coach, played as simultaneously laid-back and demanding by Jeff Bridges. Besides Bridges, there’s some nice camera work to recommend the movie. Time-lapse filming helps illustrate the rigorous training regimen. There’s little time for boys and socializing. The girls’ idea of a wild night out is OD’ing on candy at the nearest mall. I’m of two minds about the ending. It’s not predictable, but it’s also ludicrous and requires all of the gymnasts to suddenly bond in a previously absent display of girl-power platitudes.

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