The next entry on the ole' Netflix queue is my second of four thrillers and the last in the couplet of David Fincher movies topping the list. I had never seen Panic Room, even despite cable rotation, but was always interested because of a) my fleeting interest in David Fincher and b) the fact that it had stars like Jodie Foster and Forest Whitaker in it. I was hoping that these sorts of ingredients put together could make for something that wasn't all bad, even if the premise centers on something that would certainly give me claustrophobia should I be unlucky enough to experience it. I was right, you know. It wasn't all bad.
Foster plays Meg Altman, a woman going through a tough divorce and a single mother of a young, diabetic daughter named Sarah (Kristen Stewart). While striking out on their own, Meg purchases a Manhattan brownstone previously owned by an eccentric millionnaire that includes features like an elevator and a small "panic room," a people-sized vault used to hide in the case of, I don't know, weather-related danger or, you know, robberies. It's encased by steel and granite, comes complete with video surveillance of the rest of the house and survival supplies, and becomes the center of this coincidentally titled film. On the first night of residence, three burglars, Burnham (Whitaker), who helped install the panic room when his company was hired to do so; Junior (Jared Leto), who has some interest in the place for personal reasons; and Raoul (Dwight Yoakam), a sadist with a ski mask, break in. They're after loot that happens to be sealed in a safe in the panic room. What follows is a cat-and-mouse battle of wits as Meg fights for her and her daughter's survival from inside the panic room, while the three burglars (with varying degrees of conscience) try to flush them out in order to get their desired target.
Hey, I managed to stretch that out to a whole paragraph, but the truth is, Panic Room is thin on plot and extremely contrived. I think Fincher was after making a film in the style of the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, but he didn't quite pull it off. The fact that the robbers just happen to strike on Meg and Sarah's first night in the house bothered me. Then, the fact that Sarah just happened to have insulin shock somewhere in the middle of the film seemed too easy. The fact that Meg barely knew how to hook up their phone to a phone jack but then managed to think of intersplicing wires to get signal to the panic room phone (which she also didn't know how to hook up) baffled me. These are just examples of how the story simply felt forced all the way through. Also, while All Movie Guide might have been relieved by the lack of and/or sparsely distributed character development (see below), I found that failure to really provide some background into Meg and Sarah that focused the viewer, such as myself, on them from the get-go resulted in a failure for the viewer, such as myself, to connect with or relate to them in any meaningful way. I didn't want to them to meet their makers, but I also didn't care about them very much either. This is the reason why this film couldn't hold a candle to anything by Hitchcock because all of his films tantalized the viewer with enough information about their main characters to ground them into the main character's psyche and convince us to be scared or nervous right along with them.
To Fincher's credit, though, there was some tense and intense moments. I've figured out that his trademark is using the camera in motion to make sweeping shots of locales to paint the picture of size. He did that in Se7en at any rate and in Zodiac to contrast the largesse of San Francisco with the more focused, even intimate nature of the Zodiac murders themselves. Here, he works contrast between the size of this unreal Manhattan home to the shrunken, trapped quality of the panic room. Thus, when the three burglars start to have some success in their attempts to get Meg and Sarah out of the room, I felt those moments intensely.
The performances here were also kind of erratic. Jodie Foster was good, as she almost always is, making the most of her scared mom, though, again, without character development, it was hard for me to accept her as the mother of a 12 year old daughter at first, and I didn't really feel the mother-daughter bond all that much the way it was written, since there was a lot of sarcasm volleyed between the two characters. Forest Whitaker was also good, though not great, as Burnham, the robber with a conscience. Jared Leto gave a decidedly eccentric performance as twitchy Junior that served to be more annoying than any kind of scary, and Dwight Yoakam sounded like he was on valium through half the film. His sadistically unhinged Raoul was probably the most scary of the villains, but this country singer was not the right actor for the part, in my opinion.
As to production values, there wasn't much to speak of apart from the decent direction and cinematography, with its subdued, grayish hues that worked a feeling of oppression and claustrophobia in me even before Meg sought the safety of the panic room. All in all, though, Panic Room was really a movie about the thrills, not about the art of it all. The trouble is, while I got into it enough to hope that Meg and Sarah wouldn't die, and while I was sort of unsetted by Dwight Yoakam's character, after Panic Room ended in its predictable way, my feelings about the film can best be summarized this way: "meh." It really didn't achieve the thrills that it seemed to aim for, or that I would have expected from this premise.
As a result, and I've pondered this one a bit, I feel the film warrants a 6 for being cute but mediocre because it was sort of cute, how the film tried to be something it ultimately never succeeded in being. I felt some intensity and some interest but was ultimately a bit bored and felt the whole thing was an anticlimactically mediocre exercise, punctuated even moreso by the poor excuse of a denouement when the film concludes. As such, I don't think it passes the test. In reading an article about how David Fincher characterized his own work, I read that he saw Panic Room as "a really fine B-movie." That may be true, but with A-list stars and a mainstream production company backing its release, I have to see it as an A-movie that simply wasn't quite up to snuff.