Panic Room (DVD)

...his safety he installed a panic room. This is a room lined completely with 3 inches of steel and concrete, the basic premise is that you lock yourself in should you hear burglars in the house. Inside is a bank of cameras and a phone to the outside world. OF course its also packed with medical supplies. Why medical supplies and no food or sustenance is beyond me!

And as bad luck would have it, on their very first night 3 burglars get ...
...safe breaker and manufacturer of panic rooms, a gentle sort who worries more about hurting people than getting the stash!
Jared Leto plays Junior, a suave sophisticated sort who knows exactly what they are looking for but the smart suit isn’t doing any of the work! He knows exactly what they are looking for as he was the nurse looking after the old man during his last days. Believe me, he doesn’t look anything like a nurse! Junior hasn’t ... more

Being too lazy to go the cinema to watch this ‘tense psychological thriller’, its now taken me a sad lonely New Years Eve stuck in the house (and the fact that I’m crap at Prince of Persia), to sit my backside on the sofa and watch this movie. Don’t feel sad for me, I couldn’t get a babysitter!
Another reason I wanted to watch it was because of its director David Fincher, a man with an impeccable pedigree, this is the man who bought us the amazing Se7en, a film that had me gripped, Fight Club, which occasionally left me feeling nauseous, and other delights such as Straw Dogs, The Game, etc. Hopefully then this wasn’t going to be a sad distant cousin, but the storming matriarch!

Jodie Foster plays Meg Altman, a divorced single parent looking after Sarah (Kirsten Stewart), a child with diabetes. The massive house, nay mansion used to belong to a very sick, paranoid old man, fearing for his safety he installed a panic room. This is a room lined completely with 3 inches of steel and concrete, the basic premise is that you lock yourself in should you hear burglars in the house. Inside is a bank of cameras and a phone to the outside world. OF course its also packed with medical supplies. Why medical supplies and no food or sustenance is beyond me!

And as bad luck would have it, on their very first night 3 burglars get into the house through the roof, a more unlikely bunch you’ll never see! Forest Whittaker plays Burnham, a safe breaker and manufacturer of panic rooms, a gentle sort who worries more about hurting people than getting the stash!
Jared Leto plays Junior, a suave sophisticated sort who knows exactly what they are looking for but the smart suit isn’t doing any of the work! He knows exactly what they are looking for as he was the nurse looking after the old man during his last days. Believe me, he doesn’t look anything like a nurse! Junior hasn’t been entirely truthful with the rest of the gang either!
Raoul is the last of the bunch, played by a quite convincing Dwight Yoakem, when I say convincing he wears a balaclava for 90% of the film, so he could have been laughing his head off at some of the tense moments. Raoul is the ‘danger’ man of the group, hired by Junior, he’s violent and unpredictable, you know his gum isn’t going to stay in his pocket for that long!

Meg wasn’t supposed to have moved in for another week, there’s no reason given why she moved in early, she just did, And whilst we are on the subject, how on earth did she afford such a property? Employment of any kind isn’t mentioned and to say the furniture is a little sparse……..
Anyway she is in the house, she hears the burglars, they see her and the race starts to get to the panic room, she scoops up Sarah and off they run around the house trying to get to the master bedroom. Thankfully and predictably they get to the room in the nick of time and manage to shut the door!

Wow, bad men not happy, and now the fun starts! This is also the point at which we find out that what they are looking for is actually in the panic room. They have two options, break into the room or get the girls out. What follows is the escapades as they try both. Not forgetting of course that the girls want out as well! All by any means necessary!
OF course the sensible thing to do would have been to leave as soon as they discover there are people in the house, or for the girls to open the door and let them take what they want, or wait till the guys are not in the room then run and hide. Ah ha, the phone in the panic room! Lets call the cops! Oh dear, as Hollywood luck would have it, it hasn’t been connected yet. But I’ll leave you for several minutes to ponder how they could get out and talk about other aspects of the film.

The cinematography is great, we go through walls and floors, down cable lines, slow motion and whizzing through the rooms like dust motes on speed! The house, of course, is in shades of grey adding to the atmospheric turn of the film. There is a slight temptation to view it as a cinematic interactive roller coaster ride, but after my third sherry seeing the room revolve again was making me feel a little sick! Towards the end this lessened, perhaps the cameras were running out of batteries! It enhances the film, if you let, otherwise it becomes annoying.
Music I believe is very important in enhancing tension and danger in any film, but it seemed a little redundant here, I cant even know remember any of it whatsoever.

Flawless acting as usual, Meg comes across as a New York Ripley, running around the house, walking over broken glass, smacking people in the face with sledge hammers and trying to protect her daughter!

Sarah was an enigma to start with, I couldn’t work out whether she was a boy or girl and looked strangely like Macauley Culkin, but also looked very much like Jodie Foster. She is a great actress, even though she does spend quite a lot of time twitching on the floor! Sarah, I believe is supposed to be the ‘rock’ in this film, holding it together for her mother, but it really doesn’t work out that way.

The Bunglers, sorry burglars! Jared Leto is just funny, like a little boy who discovers a free box of candy, but its stuck in a pile of mud so he goes and gets some big dumb boys to get it. He provides some out-right laughs in the film, but as a sneaking conniving thief doesn’t pull it off!

Poor Burnham, you know he’s just here for the ride and the money, events go way beyond his control, but he’s the smart methodical thinker. Burnham seems like he’s turning all tough and hard, but ends up all sickly sweet and schmaltzy, I was wanting for the line ‘I’ve got a girl the same age as you and I wouldn’t want her to suffer either’ or suchlike to come out of his mouth. I think he’s supposed to be the anti-hero turned good, but that’s doesn’t work either!

Raoul, I can only think was bought in as the shock factor, the one to be scared of, the fear in the house, as it were. I was definitely not scared, more wondering who was under the mask, when the mask finally came off the big scary man I was expecting wasn’t there, but instead a chap who you were likely to see rooting in the bins outside McDonalds! Uninspiring performances by all.

Would you know how to rip a phone off the wall, find another line in the vent shaft then splice the two together to make a working phone? No, well Meg does, after being out on hold whilst calling 911 she ends up calling the ex-husband, and the words ‘Help us, there are 3’ come out of her mouth before the line is quickly cut. Enter Stephen Altman, who seems to serve as nothing more than a punch bag just to prove how hard and scary Raoul really is, rather than serving up the tension, its slightly sickening!

So there you have it, an on the edge of your seat thriller! Not for me, for me it was more a comedy of errors! The burglars and their antics bear more than a passing resemblance to Home Alone, they get bashed and burned, argue, and generally bugger things up. If Fincher was hoping to make an adult version of the above film, it did work to a degree. But as a stand alone film, it didn’t work at all.

I would argue that the tension needed to watch a film situated mainly in a box was very much missing, key elements just were not there. At the beginning of the film, Meg becomes all worried when she is in the panic room with the estate agent, none of this fear comes through when she stuck in there with no way out for nearly 3 hours! Sarah’s diabetic seizure was just too coincidental and added nothing extra, in a survival room who the hell is going to put bandages in there but no food? The violence was predictable and almost gratuitous, it was more a case of when Raoul was going to shoot somebody not if! The ending is slightly predictable, there is only one way this can end, I’m not going to give it away but its fairly obvious and very uninspired.

This film is full of whys Why didn’t Meg take Sarah’s insulin which was next to her bed, why didn’t the burglars just leave, why didn’t they smash the cameras so Meg couldn’t see where they were? Why didn’t Meg signal to the cops that something was wrong when they came to the door (cant tell you how they get to that bit, it would give too much away), why, when the burglars are out of the room didn’t they just run and hide? Why the hell didn’t the neighbours complain when the sound of the house being smashed up, drills drilling away and guns being fired at 3 in the morning? What the hell happened in the missing 2 hours? And the biggest why I was wondering was why, when the girls were told what they were looking for was in the room didn’t they even attempt to look for it and find out what it was?

Oh no, the biggest why was why the hell did I sit through nearly 2 hours of this god awful malarkey. Hype and the reputation of a director do not a good film make. Would Nicole Kidman, who had to pull out of the film 10 days before filming started due to a knee injury have made it any more convincing? I don’t think so, the main problem with this film, is that it tries to be dark and tense but the characters of the burglars are totally wrong. It is a good Sunday night film, but I would have felt cheated paying out money to watch it at the cinema, and several cigarette breaks were soon spotted!

Mr Fincher is going to have to come up with a much better film than this to match the success of Fight Club and the critical acclaim of Se7en.
But is it always fair to blame the director?, no I think the screenwriter also has a great deal to answer for is this thinly plotted, contrived film. And blow me down if I wasn’t astonished by who the screenwriter was? David Keopp! Never heard of him? Ok, he wrote the screenplay for Spiderman, wrote and directed Stir of Echoes (fabulous film), and also worked on Carlitos Way, Toy Soldiers, Jurassic Park I and II, Mission Impossible, Snake Eyes and more! Just goes to show, you can out a brilliant actress, director and writer in the same room and the end product can still turn out badly!

Unfortunately this turkey of a film ends up as no more than a Home Alone for grown ups!

My first review of the New Year and a good New Year to you all!!
 

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