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! ... Read review
Trapped in their New York brownstone's panic room, a hidden chamber built as a sanctuary ... more
in the event of break-ins, newly divorced Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) and her young daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart) play a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with three i...
It was supposed to be the safest room in the house. Meg Altman is at a crossroads. ... more
Suffering through a painful divorce from her husband pharmaceuticals millionaire Stephen Altman Meg moves from their suburban home in Greenwich New York and buys an...
Postage & Packaging: £0.00 Availability: 3-5 working days
Trapped in their New York apartment's 'Panic Room', a hidden chamber built as a sanctuary ... more
in the event of break-ins, Meg Altman (Foster) and her young daughter, are forced to play a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with three brutal and deadly intruders.
A divorced woman and her daughter try to outwit a violent gangwho break into their house ... more
to retrieve treasure hidden by one thegang's grandfather, in a room known as the panic room. Even thecamera can't leave the house in this taut, claustrophobic thrillerwhich confronts some of our worst urban fears. DUAL CODED REGION 4 and REGION 2
Meg Altman is at a crossroads. Suffering through a painful divorce from her husband ... more
pharmaceuticals millionaire Stephen Altman Meg moves from their suburban home in Greenwich Connecticut and buys and Upper West Side Manhattan townhouse for herself and her eleven-year-old daughter Sarah. She intends to go back to school raise her child and start a new life. But the panic she feels at starting over pales in comparison to her fear and desperation when intruders break into her new home.
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Thriller - Original Language: English - Classification: 15 years and over - Starring: Timothy West, Neil Morrissey, Tara Fitzgerald, Annette Crosbie, Pauline Quirke, Rob Brydon, Denise Van Outen, John Thomson, Kevin Whately, David Suchet
Production Year: 2002 - Thriller - Director: Bharat Nalluri, Rob Bailey, Andy Wilson - Original Language: English - Classification: 15 years and over - Starring: Matthew MacFadyen, Keeley Hawes, David Oyelowo, Peter Firth, Jenny Agutter, Lisa Faulkner
Advantages: Whiled away a couple of hours on an evening Disadvantages: Unconvincing characters, farcical
...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!!
Advantages: Great film boosted by a superb set of extras Disadvantages: You will need a multi-region dvd player to run it
...Story: Trapped inside an impenetrable panic room, newly divorced Meg Altman and daughter Sarah play a deadly game of cat and mouse with three intruders. All Meg
wants is her daughters safety. All the intruders want is what has been secretly stashed in the panic room...
The Film
A simple concept it may be, but David Finchers’ creative talents turn Panic Room into a highly enjoyable pot-boiler. Though never reaching the classic status ... ...impact, but that doesn’t stop Panic Room from being a tense and terrific thriller.
Picture and Audio
Presented in Anamorphic Widescreen 2.40:1. The picture is crisp and clear and once you realise exactly what went into to creating the films colour you will appreciate it even more. The piece de resistance is 'The Big Shot'..the camera swoops down three floors from Megs bedroom to witness the attempted break in, all while zooming in and out ...
Crib79 16.04.2004
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Panic Room (DVD)
Advantages: Gripping, well crafted thriller Disadvantages: The ending..oh, the ending...
...crime is to have a panic room in your house. A panic room is an impregnable place of refuge, where the occupants of a house are able to hide out in the event that an intruder makes his/her way into the home. If you think about it, if used, a panic room is the ultimate symbol of violation – a man could literally become a prisoner in his own home. This is the idea behind David Fincher’s latest thriller.
Meg Altman has recently divorced ... ...interestingly, there is a secret panic room behind the mirror in the main bedroom. Security cameras in every room, all of which can be watched from within the panic room, monitor the house. The room has an impregnable steel door, and an isolated telephone line, so that help can be reached in the event of an emergency.
Despite her reservations about the size of the property and the fact that the house is rather creepy, Meg is persuaded to sign the ...
LostWitness 15.11.2002
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Panic Room (DVD)
Advantages: Slick, the work of a genius. Disadvantages: None
David Fincher (the Director of Panic Room) was attacked as a Neo- Nazi by many critics after his last movie Fight Club. He was also slated for Seven which came before that, establishing him as truly controversial. So in light of his past films, Panic Room is a step down from the critic bating Fight Club or the full on gore of Seven and Alien 3. This is his sixth film not his fifth as many people mistakenly believe, and he is currently one of only ... ...Panic Room takes after Finchers last hits and is a true masterpiece of suspense and non-stop thrills, as he proves himself the master at turning a run-of-the-mill idea into an electrifying, spellbinding thriller. Seven is a perfect example of this as the age old plot of an old and young cop after a serial killer is given a new fresh makeover, and this is true of Panic Room where ancient clichés are rejuvenated. Clichés are only bad when they don’t ...
willgould 04.05.2002 (31.08.2002)
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Panic Room (DVD)
Advantages: Impressive camerawork, good central idea and characters Disadvantages: That magical something special is missing
Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) is recently divorced from her cheating husband and is looking for a new apartment for her and her daughter, Sarah (newcomer Kristen Stewart). Meg suffers slightly from claustrophobia so when they are shown round a spacious "Townstone" apartment in New York, consisting of several floors, they jump at the chance and move in immediately.
The "Panic Room" of the title refers to a secret security room built into the main bedroom, ... ...It is impenetrable, complete with its own surveillance system, phone line and supplies. Unsurprisingly, on their very first night in their new home, the two women have to make use of the facility when a gang of ruthless robbers breaks in.
Considering the room is supposed to be safe you might think that that would be the end of the movie, but far from it. The phone line is not connected, cutting them off from the outside world. Then it transpires ...
Crazy-Christian 10.07.2002
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Panic Room (DVD)
Advantages: Some tense moments and Jodie Foster is always worth watching Disadvantages: Not quite 'all there' to make this a classic chiller
...you guessed it – the Panic Room!
Mother and daughter manage to elude the villains and get to the room just in time and the movie then focuses on how the thugs try to get their prey out of there. Plus, how Meg and her daughter can survive the terrifying attempts, try to summon help and overcome Sarah’s life threatening diabetic condition. Harrowing stuff at times and certainly something that any parent can really feel for.
There are plenty of dark ... ...mind, not much need to panic there (well, maybe…)
But, I digress. As ever, it is the emotional torment and torture portrayed excellently by Ms Foster that has taken this movie to the top of the US Box Office charts earlier this year. Surprise hit that it was, it is now replicatjng that success over here, to a certain extent and might be a good alternative for any of you wanting to escape the ‘Clones’.
It is not a perfect piece of work – after all, ...
flashpointz 20.05.2002
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Panic Room (DVD)
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Advantages: Scary Disadvantages: Lots of action on a small set
Starring: Jodie Foster, Jared Leto, Forest Whitaker, Dwight Yoakam, Holt McCallany, Ann Magnuson, Patrick Bauchau, Ian Buchanan, Kristen Stewart, Andrew Kevin Walker
Directed by: David Fincher
Writer: David Koepp
Certificate 15 years and over
Year 2002
Screen Widescreen 2.40:1 Anamorphic
Languages English ; Spanish - Dolby Digital (5.1)
Subtitles English ; Hindi ; Portuguese ; Spanish
DVD EXTRAS
3 Easter Eggs - the strangest thing to come out with dvds!
Commentary. 'Shooting of PanicRoom'. Visual effects feature. making of. Photo gallery. 4 extra scenes. Short film 'Habitrail'. Theatrical trailer. 'Creating The Previz'. On sound design. Safe Cracking School. Make up effects feature.
Product Details (taken from :-
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0001AVZCQ/103-1657338-1684655?v=glance&n=130 ...
Advantages: exciting, full of mysteries, great plot Disadvantages: none
psychic powers with the use of objects to see into the past but his powers have robbed him of his sight. He works very closely with his partner, Lilia, the bearded lady.
Debra has starred in films like MouseHunt (1997), and Wild Wild West (1999)
Patrick has starred in films like PanicRoom (2002).
As well as many other characters that play a part of this magnificent story.
The DVD contains 6 disks containing 2 episodes on each disk with the episodes:
1. Milfay
2. After the Ball Is Over
3. Tipton
4. Black Blizzard
5. Babylon
6. Pick a Number
7. The River
8. Lonnigan, Texas
9. Insomnia
10. Hot and Bothered
11. The Day of the Dead
12. The Day That Was the Day
Run Time: 720 min
Extras: Behind the Scenes of Carnivale, that has character interview and behind the scenes crew. It also contains three audio commentaries ...
Meg Altman and daughter, Sarah, take sanctuary in her New York apartment's 'panic room' which is designed to act as a refuge in the event of a break in...
Director And Cast Filmographies, Panic Room Teaser Created By David Fincher
Aspect Ratio
2.40 Wide Screen, 16:9 Wide Screen
Sound
DTS, Dolby Digital 5.1
Dubbing Sound
DTS English Dolby Digital 5.1 English
Professional reviews
Review
"...PANIC ROOM rigorously and ingeniously maps narrative onto space....It's the internal rhythms of each shot, the counterpoint of images and sound, and the jolt of each edit that are inexhaustibly pleasurable..." (Film Comment, p.74-5, 01/05/2002)
"...Fincher again demonstrates undeniable visual flair. There are swooping, insinuating camera moves, disconcerting rolls and tumbles, and all manner of bravura displays..." (Los Angeles Times, p.C1, 29/03/2002)
"...Mr. Fincher has mastered the traditional syntax of cinematic suspense: the shifting points of view, startling cuts and slow camera movements that work subliminally to fill us with dread and anxiety..." (New York Times, p.E1, 29/03/2002)
"...PANIC ROOM is Fincher's high-style testament to the cool things movies can do to make us jump out of our seats in the dark....Foster nails the role, giving a tight, focused performance illuminated by shards of feeling..." (Rolling Stone, p.137-8, 11/04/2002)
"...PANIC ROOM sticks with us. Fincher works on a deeper level than just scares. He shows us the demons prowling around in our subconscious, where we really live..." (Rolling Stone, p.80, 09/05/2002)
"...Eyeball it as a sustained exercise in style and suspense and it delivers. Big time....Fincher succeeds by literally ignoring the boundaries..." (Total Film, p.98-9, 01/06/2002)
"...Efficiently directed, fabulously shot....Photographed in the darkest visible tones by two of the industries greatest, ROOM and its tilting/panning camera have a blast zipping through and around a dozen large rooms..." (USA Today, p.4E, 29/03/2002)
As David Fincher's PANIC ROOM begins, recently divorced Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) halfheartedly tours through an old New York City townhouse with her restless young daughter, Sarah (Kristen Stewart). Using money from her divorce settlement, the unhappy mother decides to buy the spacious home. The former abode of a wealthy eccentric, this townhouse contains an unusual extra feature, a supposedly impenetrable "panic room" equipped with surveillance monitors, a separate phone line, and other survival aids, where residents can hide in case of emergency. When three men--Burnham (Forest Whitaker, BLOODSPORT), Junior (Jared Leto, FIGHT CLUB), and Raoul (Dwight Yoakam, CRANK)--break into their new home, Meg and Sarah end up using the panic room much sooner than they could have possibly imagined. And, unfortunately for them, these intruders are not simple burglars; they possess knowledge that makes the situation much more perilous. Hitchcockian in its confined setting and carefully doled-out suspense, Fincher's PANIC ROOM is more straightforward than his infamous FIGHT CLUB, though no less engaging. Foster (who replaced Nicole Kidman after she injured herself on the set of MOULIN ROUGE) gives her best performance since THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. The thieves are equally compelling--Whitaker shines as a likeable, sad-eyed security expert; Leto provides comic relief as a talkative brat; and Yoakam is perfectly loathsome as an armed-to-the-teeth psycho. Although the film features some of Fincher's trademark hi-tech effects, its true bells and whistles are the excellent cast, the stunning photography, the moody score, and the simple yet thrilling story.
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