|
 avid Fincher ("Fight
Club") has been one of my favorite directors since he burst onto the
scene with "Alien 3", but his choice to direct "Panic Room"
is, in my must humble of opinions, a mistake. I believe Fincher is one of those
directors who need room to work, but the claustrophobic settings of "Panic
Room" essentially consist of two locations: the panic room itself, a room
the size of a closet; and the New York house that the panic room is located
within. With such limited and cramp spaces, Fincher's trademark bright colors
and ethereal cinematography is wasted.
"Panic Room" stars Jodie Foster as Meg, a recent
divorcee who moves into her new house with her daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart).
On the first night mother and daughter stays at the house, 3 criminals break
inside, believing no one will be home. They are shocked to find Meg and Sarah
asleep in bed, but before the less-than-organized crooks can get a handle on the
situation, Meg and Sarah seeks shelter in the panic room – essentially an
invincible bunker built into the house's third floor, located inside the master
bedroom. The panic room has all the necessities to stay alive for a long time,
including video monitors to keep an eye on the rest of the house, and an
independent phone. Unfortunately Meg has yet to install the panic room's phone,
and Meg herself is claustrophobic, while Sarah is diabetic…
The bulk of the film involves the crooks, led by the
clueless Junior (Jared Leto), trying to break into the seemingly impenetrable
panic room. The crooks have a wild card in Burnham (Forest Whitaker), a security
expert who helped install the panic room, and knows all of its ins and outs. But
there's a problem, and his name is Raoul (Dwight Yoakam), a mask-wearing thug
with a gun and the will to use it. The main goal of the crooks is not Meg or
Sarah, but the panic room itself, and the money hidden in there by the house's
previous owner. This revelation doesn't bold well for mother and daughter as
Sarah's regular insulin injection nears, and her medicine is locked away in her
refrigerator outside the panic room.
Written by David Koepp ("Spiderman"),
"Panic Room" wants to be a taut and tension-filled thriller, but it
has trouble maintaining both. Maybe it's the conditions, or the setting, but the
film just doesn't have one hour and 50 minutes of tension in it. As a result,
the movie has to throw in a couple of twists toward the end to keep things
moving and interesting. Besides an unpredictable twist near the end where Meg
reverses places with the crooks, the movie consists of a series of break-in
attempts by the crooks and Meg finding ways around it, and vice versa. And
between every attempt, the crooks bicker, stop, and bicker some more.
With so much running time to spend, Koepp has to throw in
the internal conflict among the crooks. The gun-brandishing Raoul becomes a
powder keg, but remains relatively stupid. The sympathetic Burnham wants this to
be an easy job, but Meg and Sarah's presence throws all of his plans out of the
window and triggers his conscience. Jared Leto's Junior is funny as the bumbling
boss who doesn't have a single original idea in his head. In an attempt to give
the characters personalities, the 3 men's backgrounds and motivations for the
break-in are exposed through their constant bickering. Although I can't help but
think that it might have been a better idea to make all 3 men as nasty and
bloodthirsty as possible, thus heightening the tension between mother and
daughter and the crooks who wants to get to them. Why make one of them
sympathetic, one bumbling, and the other a psychopath? Why not make them all
psychopaths?
Despite a lot of creativity with the camerawork,
"Panic Room" remains a rather blasé affair. Fincher, as he's want to
do, somehow manages to move the camera through every crevice, floor, door, and
wall in the house without stopping once. These elaborate camera moves were
probably aided by cgi and special effects, but they look absolutely gorgeous
nonetheless.
Jodie Foster, who has been picking her film projects very
carefully in the last few years, is very good as Meg, the divorcee determined to
keep her daughter and herself safe at all cost. Meg fights back because she's
not the kind of woman to lie down for anyone, and her quick thinking keeps her
one step ahead of the bad guys. Kristen Stewart, as Foster's daughter, sometimes
gets on the nerve, and her smart-aleck comments and personality seems
artificial, coming across like the perception of teens according to an adult
rather than actual teen behavior. Country singer Dwight Yoakam, on the other
hand, thrills as the trigger-happy Raoul.
"Panic Room" is an interesting film, with a very
interesting premise, but in the end its own cramped space (and cramped script)
does it in. It's a worthwhile film, Fincher shows his creative flairs every now
and then, but perhaps a shorter running time would have benefited the movie.
After all, if your concept is this limited, wouldn't 90 minutes or less be much
more manageable than an hour and 50 minutes?
|
