|
How entertaining? ★☆☆☆☆
Thought provoking? ★☆☆☆☆ 10 March 2011
This a movie review of THE RESIDENT. |
“What's the matter with you? Why don't you stand up for yourself? Just like your father. Your mother, she was beautiful. But she married a weak man. And then she gave birth to another,” August (Christopher Lee)
Hammer is an iconic brand for horror, and I was looking forward to seeing what they, combined with a quality cast (Hilary Swank, Lee Pace, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Christopher Lee), could pull out of the bag. (By the way their logo revealed in the pre-credits is a bit too Marvel and DC Comics.)
Hammer is an iconic brand for horror, and I was looking forward to seeing what they, combined with a quality cast (Hilary Swank, Lee Pace, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Christopher Lee), could pull out of the bag. (By the way their logo revealed in the pre-credits is a bit too Marvel and DC Comics.)
|
|
|
|
|
Swank is Juliet Devereau, an emergency room doctor living in a hotel, due to a break-up, and is looking to rent in New York. She finds a ridiculously great apartment at a knock-down rate. Hello! Alarm bells Juliet! None seem to go off though, even with the creepy grandfather (Lee) of the landlord Max (Morgan) living down the hall. I’d like to have a drink with Christopher Lee, but I’m not sure I’d want to live near him. Actually, that might be quite great! Anyway, so there’s the set-up, you know that her flat is not going to be a bunch of laughs for her. Suddenly all those fun home invasion thrillers spring to mind: PANIC ROOM, PACIFIC HEIGHTS and recently DREAM HOME. However, as you can guess from the above score, this is not one of them.
As Juliet sleeps, takes a bath, etc. she is being watched. Not SLIVER-style with hi-tech cameras, but by someone in the walls looking through a two-way mirror or spy-holes. That’s not what you want is it? And there is tension, but THE RESIDENT feels tired and not particularly inventive. There are basically three possible culprits (including her ex (Pace), who is following her around); and then about half-hour in, the voyeur is revealed. He is revealed by a rewind, where we watch the same thing again truncated but from his perspective. At first, I thought neat device, but then I realised they didn’t bother changing the camera angle much so I’m getting a recap of something I’ve literally just seen. The vibe appears to be going for queasily unsettling, but it ends up being cliché scares and WTF-are-you-doing-questions. Juliet has cameras installed, but doesn’t bother checking them. She knows he’s a nutter and then unsubtly tries to call her boyfriend in front of him. This would be a TV movie if it wasn’t for Guillermo Navarro’s (JACKIE BROWN, PAN’S LABYRINTH) cinematography.
The cast is above the material. Morgan has been doing some very solid work in comic book adaptations (WATCHMEN; THE LOSERS). Pace was great in THE FALL. Lee is Lee. Swank though, what are you doing? This is another recent dud after AMELIA and CONVICTION.
If you like your horror clichés mixed with Apple product placement, this is for you.
