Disturbia (Niepokój)

Kale Brecht was a happy and an average teenager. Since his father died in a terrible accident, everything has changed. The boy became a pain in the neck and a scoundrel. He is causing many educational problems in the school background and for his mother Julie. Soon, Kale gets into serious trouble with the police and is being sentenced to home prison. Furthermore, his mother bans his iTunes account, disconnects the internet connection and cable television. Bored Kale draw outs his binoculars and entertains himself by watching some next-door neighbors. His peeping soon reveals a terrific truth about one of them. But is it the truth or locked up Kale is making up things just to get proper attention?

The director of "Disturbia", DJ Caruso, is one of the typical workers in the Hollywood mass movie production. He takes on with making classic box-office hits (he made "Taking Lives" with Angelina Jolie and "Two for the money" with Al Pacino) and it seems like he enjoys it. And with "Disturbia" it looks quite similar. Not only does it looks as if it was a simple one-night-stand movie just to watch and quickly forget, but it also indicates the potential target audience (who are average teenagers).

The movie trailers represent it as if it was a thriller. Well, the first impression may be often misleading and in this case it definitely is. "Disturbia" is divided into two parts. The first one is a typical teenage romantic comedy. The topics, on which the creators concentrate on, don't go over the basic needs of a modern teen male. Those values haven't really changed since "American Pie" (parties, sex, immature entertainments and after this the concept of understanding real love). Luckily, the level of humor is high above the normal American comedy. There are, practically, no slapstick jokes that give space for many verbal encounters. They keep up a quite decent rank and gives the story a very light-hearted approach. The second part starts at the end and is a gripping Hollywood thriller. It provides a dark-room atmosphere, a psychotic murderer as the hunter and a predictable chase. What is more interesting, in the first couple of ending scenes, the authors create a blair-witch-like techniques by adding a digital camera and the view from it. So all in all, nice realization work.

Too bad that the script is so predictable. We know who is the killer even if the main protagonists are not sure about it. Furthermore, even watching only the trailer will give us a general idea about the whole plot. Nothing new and revolutionary was added to the movie, in order to make it more fascinating or shocking. Even the misleads are being not so well prepared and in conclusion, they don't appear to be credible.

"Disturbia" wasn't supposed to be an ambitious and fresh movie. The trick was to present the Hitchcock's classic movie in a typical teenage movie. The results are good but not astonishing. We got a mixture of a romantic comedy and a low-ambitious thriller to satisfy simple teenagers. It could be an unsophisticated date movie or a time-eater for some boring evenings. It would be also a good party movie, from which everyone should be pleased with. The mass target movie experiment resulted in positive remarks, especially that it's an example of a non-ambitious Hollywood film. The sentence sounds like an oxymoron, but doesn't look like one. If you don't know what to do, maybe you should give it a try? Huh?