Disturbia - 3

This film hitched its wagon to Rear Window, which means it pretty much set itself up to fail. The similarities are that a housebound guy, starts staring at his neighbors and his paranoia convinces him that his neighbor is a murderer. In this case Kale (Shia LaBeouf), a high-schooler who is under house arrest for punching his teacher- not a pleasant way to spend summer vacation. He gets bored, starts peering in on the neighbors, takes a liking to the new girl next store (Sarah Roemer), seeks payback to the punks across the street, and gets paranoid by a creepy older man (David Morse) who is slowly adding up to the suspect in an ongoing news story. Its pretty clear where all of this is going, Kale gets the girl and needs to be right in his rebellion against his mother (Carrie-Anne Moss) and his spying. The film is governed by PG-13 slasher constraints- the main goal here being to make the audience jumpy, rather than creatively telling a story (which is why Rear Window works 50 years later- that and the ending). In the end, it all just works itself out too easily.