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Volume CXXXI, Number 21 |
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Panic Room mildly frightening
MONICA GUZMAN
COLUMNIST
Maybe it's unfair, but there's an unspoken understanding between filmmakers
and moviegoers that if you direct one great movie, they'd all better be
great afterwards. After all, talent is hard to come by in Hollywood, and
if you have it, you'd better use it and it had better work. If it doesn't,
you become Kevin Costner, and after the trillionth bad movie you make,
people will finally forget Dances With Wolves and will start to
hate you.
I can only hope that this never becomes the case with director David
Fincher, who gave us the masterpieces Fight Club and Seven
a couple years back. He's come to a bump. There's a ray of hope, though:
unlike Costner, Fincher didn't actually try to make Panic Room an
A+; he meant to slide by with a C.
Not only was Fincher given a premise full of thrilling possibilities
in Panic Room, he even got Jodie Foster-Jodie Foster! The female
Edward Norton, I thought. Surely he'll squeeze out all the talent that
girl's got-he'll make this film all it can be.
Well, he didn't, but at least he admitted it: "A number of the film's
problems were created by my inability to allow the film to grow in the
ways it wanted to," he said in an interview.
Though Panic Room was unable to reach its potential, what it does
provide is edge-of-your-seat entertainment, joining the many fleeting
but fun "popcorn movies" that give you two hours of thrills
but nothing to remember them by.
Panic Room is the story of Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) and Sarah Altman's
(Kristen Stewart) first night in their new home. Not knowing that anyone
lived in the house, three burglars (Jared Leto, Forest Whitaker, and Dwight
Yoakam) break in with the intention of stealing the fortune that is hiding
in the house's maximum-security panic room. But Meg and Sarah get there
first and refuse to come out, sparking the night's suspenseful events.
I found the structure of the film to be sort of like an essay: the first
20 minutes made up the exciting introduction, setting up a promising story
that has a million places to go. The rest of the film provides a series
of supporting arguments all making the same point; Meg and Sarah spend
a lot of time sitting in the room, while the burglars spend a lot of time
being stupid, providing some of the film's funnier moments. All in all,
the movie doesn't really go anywhere; it stays right where it was at the
end of the intro. The characters are hung out to dry, the plot rots, and
the ending-well, the ending absolutely sucks. Blame this on the writer,
David Koepp, who also gave us Stir of Echoes. You'd think Fincher
would make the necessary adjustments and save his movie from its all too
apparent script shortcomings-but no.
Of course, I'm being picky. But, see, that's kind of my job. So for all
you not-so-hard-to-please moviegoers out there I want to reiterate the
fact that despite its apparent defects, this film is thrilling and fun
to watch. And even though Meg's character doesn't really develop, Jodi
sure knows how to light up a room full of propane gas, run up and down
stairs, and kick some burglar arse.
If David Fincher didn't direct this film-if it were some no-name who
hadn't made one of my favorite movies ever-then maybe I wouldn't be so
disillusioned. But talent that goes to waste is just disgusting, especially
in these tough cinematic times when good movies are becoming a dying breed.
If you got it, flaunt it, oh Hollywood filmmakers. Leave the "popcorn
movies" to the amateurs and give us the good stuff.