From the Friday, Sept. 19 Oregonian....
"Lakeview Terrace" grabs a fistful of hot-button story elements -- race, sex, politics -- and promptly mixes them into the thriller equivalent of tapioca.
The film stars Samuel L. Jackson as Abel Turner, a fuming, conservative, widowed bully of an L.A. cop. (Look for the actor Robert Pine playing his LAPD captain, suggesting that Abel lives in the "CHiPs" universe.) Abel takes a firm hand with the two kids he's trying to raise as a single parent.
Also -- for reasons that are off-the-charts ridiculous once he finally reveals them -- Abel is opposed to interracial marriage. Violently opposed, in fact.
So you can imagine the wacky mayhem that ensues when a mixed-race, Prius-driving, blandly NPR-liberal couple moves in next door: white grocery-chain executive Chris (Patrick Wilson) and his African-American artist wife Lisa (Kerry Washington). The tension begins with thinly veiled slurs and arguments over discarded cigarette butts. It ends with a body count and the sad spectacle of Jackson throwing out every single complicated aspect of Abel's character to coast on his trademark scowls and glowers.
"Lakeview Terrace" is co-produced by Will Smith and directed by "In the Company of Men" provocateur Neil LaBute, and they made exactly one interesting choice: Listening to the words in the screenplay, one suspects that LaBute has deliberately reversed all the characters' races. I'd bet good money that Abel was originally written as white, Chris was African-American, and so forth.
I suppose that's the sort of thing that would "reframe the debate" if the movie bothered to stage a debate. Unfortunately, other than the race flip, every directorial and screenwriting choice in "Lakeview Terrace" is monumentally boring or illogical.
Every chat between Chris and Lisa feels like it was written by some sort of Automatic Relationship Generator software, coded in the '80s by someone who had never, in fact, been in a relationship. The neighborly feud takes way too long to build any sort of momentum. And, worst of all, there's a clear breaking point in the script when Abel's kids are sent away for a couple of weeks -- and the movie very suddenly and clumsily turns into a good-versus-evil punch-a-thon, dropping every single story thread it was developing.
Abel's kids, Chris and Lisa's pregnancy debate, an Internal Affairs investigation, some vague frame-up attempt involving a stripper and a home video, tension with Lisa's father (Ron Glass) -- all of it completely evaporates, unresolved.
LaBute can't even be bothered to shoot for the pure loopy heights of artistically committed stupidity he hit in his last work-for-hire gig, Nicolas Cage's "Wicker Man." And when you find yourself missing "The Wicker Man," you have a serious problem.
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C-minus; 110 minutes; rated PG-13 for intense thematic material, violence, sexuality, language and some drug references.
'Lakeview Terrace' (The Oregonian, Friday. Sept. 19, 2008)
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