Lakeview Terrace.

"At first glance, it may puzzle followers of dramatist and occasional filmmaker Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men, The Shape of Things) that the American stage's crown prince of psychosexual power plays and the post-coital mindfuck has opted to follow his universally mocked 2006 remake of The Wicker Man by working as a director-for-hire on a yuppies-in-peril thriller that seems about two decades past its freshness date," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice. "But peer beneath Lakeview Terrace's lurid, exploitation-movie surface and you will find a vintage LaBute proposition: a taut three-hander that explores the space between surface appearances and realities, between what people say and what they really think."

Updated through 9/19.

"Are we really supposed to stomach a thriller in which the root of all evil is intelligent black men in power who can't stomach, to the point of going full-on psychotic, the sight of a white man married to a black woman?" rages Nick Schager in Slant. "Apparently so..."

In the New Yorker, Anthony Lane muses on the star: "It comes as a shock to realize that, in three months' time, Samuel L Jackson will turn 60. We can't think of him growing old, just as we can't really imagine that he was ever young. He seemed to arrive on our screens full grown: ripe in mind and muscle, richly amused, and already in possession of his gifts."

"Jackson skirts the edge of going overboard with his portrayal, widening his eyes so much at times that you expect him to start foaming at the mouth and fulminating about 'race mixing' and 'miscegenation,'" notes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "If an actor this talented is going to slum it in hokey, over-the-top thrillers, I'd prefer he direct his anger at those mother-effing snakes on that mother-effing plane."

"When, with things on the verge of total disaster, the final secret is revealed, we realize that we have been masterfully manipulated, ostensibly for our own good," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "In these too often guileless days, even a little trickery can go a long way."

"The movie deserves credit for provoking discussion rather than simply inflaming racial paranoia à la Crash (2004), even if in the end it falters by reverting to the usual thriller clichés." Dennis Harvey in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

"The director's usual plot contrivances and false notes abound," sighs Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine. Oh, and: "Labute's next project has already been announced: he will script a remake of a Truffaut film."

Mr Beaks talks with Jackson for AICN.

Updates, 9/18: "LaBute, like Jackson, isn't interested in brotherhood or understanding; he likes to irritate," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "This is LaBute's first time assaying black racism—a twist on his usual tweaking of misogyny, homophobia and generalized cruelty. That LaBute has nothing genuine to say about these social ills is what has won his acclaim; critics see their own fears and biases in LaBute's contrived theatrics."

"The first two-thirds of Lakeview Terrace feel like Marxist propaganda, the last third like capitalist propaganda, the whole thing like some sort of distinctly American nightmare, with some surprisingly curious politics and one hell of a dunderheaded narrative." Josef Braun.

Updates, 9/19: "Lakeview Terrace isn't literally about the [Los Angeles riots of 1992], but it's still one of the toughest racial dramas to come out of Hollywood since the fires died down - much tougher, for instance, than Paul Haggis's hand-wringing Oscar winner Crash," argues JR Jones in the Chicago Reader. "Its masterstroke is reversing the racial polarity of the [Rodney] King beating, making the cop black and the victim of his abuse white. At first glance this might seem like the ultimate dodge, relieving white viewers of any lingering guilt and lending credence to the Rush Limbaughs of the world. But by scrambling the typical power relationship Lakeview Terrace focuses our attention on power itself, and by plunging into the subject of black bigotry, still relatively taboo in mainstream movies, it gets us closer to the truth of bigotry in all its forms than we're liable to get watching another pious exercise in white atonement."

"Even while making a superb thriller, LaBute makes the film more than that," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "It deals with one of his themes, the difficult transition from prolonged adolescence to manhood, a journey Chris takes in the film."

"The hostility of a middle-age, middle-class African-American man toward a younger, more privileged, racially mixed couple is a potentially interesting subject, fraught with bitter history and complicated sexual politics," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "But Bernie Mac did more with the topic in a few throwaway moments of the lamebrain comedy Guess Who than Mr Jackson manages in all of Lakeview Terrace.... Considered purely as a formal exercise, Lakeview Terrace is a passable piece of hackwork, with some adequately suspenseful passages and a few mild shocks near the end. But the psychological dimensions of the story are so risible, and its supposed insights into race and class so wrongheaded and ugly, that irritation trumps enjoyment."

"What more does Neil LaBute have to teach us about humanity that wasn't already apparent in his caustic 1997 debut feature, In The Company of Men?" asks Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "There's nothing wrong with a filmmaker having a misanthropic worldview, but LaBute's is an unusually narrow one, predicated on the notion that men are engaged in alpha-male one-upmanship and women are, if anything, even more diabolical.... So when LaBute pulls the grenade pin on racism and interracial relationships in Lakeview Terrace, viewers should know to duck and cover."

"However close to self-parody LaBute's output eventually became, the underlying venom at least set it apart from the norm," writes Andrew Wright in the Stranger, looking back on the oeuvre. "The new urban thriller Lakeview Terrace proves that—whatever the state of LaBute's once-blistering talents—he can now be counted on to make a studio picture more or less indistinguishable from anything else on the assembly line. (Um, yay?) It hangs together better than his last few, certainly, but don't call it a comeback just yet."

"Well shot but deliberately unstylish, with most of its characters briefly sketched instead of carefully painted, Lakeview Terrace is a platter serving up Mr Jackson's performance," writes Grady Hendrix in the New York Sun. "Considering the subject matter and his highly excitable character, he is given more than enough rope with which to hang himself. Instead, Mr Jackson delivers his most nuanced performance in nearly a decade, at least since 2000's Unbreakable."

"The upshot is that Jackson is in sync with the filmmakers' less inflammatory mission: working you up over an unhinged dude in a blue uniform rather than an angry guy with black skin." Robert Abele in the Los Angeles Times.

Ben Kenigsberg in Time Out New York: "Neil LaBute didn't write this film, and it shows; the attempts to tweak racial stereotypes are undermined by the schematics of David Loughery and Howard Korder's screenplay - or perhaps the Hollywood committee-think imposed upon it."

Posted by dwhudson at September 17, 2008 2:30 PM