IT USED to bring me great joy if there was a little Samuel L Jackson in any movie, simply because he's so compulsively watchable that he brings even mediocre things to life. There may be no actor working today who has a better use for an incredulous
laugh. He can turn an innocent line into a veiled promise of menace. But even his scene-chewing élan is challenged by Lakeview Terrace.
Jackson is Abel Turner, an embittered middle-aged cop and widower raising two kids on his own. He has rules: he corrects his kids' English and bans them from wearing T-shirts which honour athletes whose lifestyles he doesn't approve of. He has simmering resentments. And his years with a badge have made him a bully, who declares a passive-aggressive war on an attractive young couple because he doesn't approve of their mixed race marriage.
Chris and Lisa (Patrick Wilson of Little Children and Kerry Washington of The Last King Of Scotland) have moved house to support Chris's career. The strain of the move, differences in when they should begin a family, and the divisions between Chris and his father-in-law are nothing, however, to their noxious neighbour.
Abel plays a cat-and-mouse game of making their lives difficult – shining a security light at their bedroom window, messing with their air conditioning, letting Lisa know all about Chris's secret cigarette habit – but always covers his actions with plausible deniability. Less a psychological thriller, more a straightforward drama with a little bit of tension and violence, Lakeview Terrace appears to want to say something about race relations and how insidious prejudice can be. Some of its points about well-intentioned political correctness are neatly done: Chris considers himself open-minded, but his well-advertised racial emancipation is put to the test here and he seems happy to box Lisa's law-abiding, non-bonkers father along with Abel, simply because they are both black men from the same generation.
Yet the film's conversation ends up going nowhere and gives way to clichés instead, so that Lakeview Terrace joins the dated and unremarkable ranks of countless movies in which otherwise happy yuppies are tortured by an outsider, until they snap and decide to get tooled up and fight back.
Chris and Lisa are benign ciphers who swap psycho-babble chatter, and the script never inquires far enough into the racial tensions that surely must exist between them. The best scenes involve some darkly amusing clashes over piffling issues: when Chris plants trees that overhang Abel's fence, the two go at it with gardening tools. Chris likes rap but Abel doesn't. "You can listen to that noise all night long," jibes Abel, "but when you wake up in the morning, you'll still be white." Yet the movie feels like a series of moments without a plot, and director Neil LaBute moves through them at a strangely stately pace.
LaBute has built a career on reminding audiences how awful people can be – sexist, manipulative, cruel – but it's got to the point when his misanthropy is no longer shocking, it's a motif as predictable as M Night Shyamalan's corkscrewing finales. Just as we know that the man who made Sixth Sense and Unbreakable can be relied on to pull our rug of expectations from under us, with LaBute we know we've got bleak satire and hammy provocations. It's not always easy to tell who the good guy is in Neil LaBute's films because usually there are mostly bad guys to choose from. In gender-bias allegories such as In The Company Of Men and Your Friends And Neighbors, and even his silly remake of The Wicker Man, he's always trying to push buttons. However, Lakeview is not a LaBute script, and neither the director nor David Loughery and Howard Korder, who wrote the Lakeview script, really get to grips with the complexities of race. This really isn't much more than a role reversal Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, where someone is in danger of getting lamped with a lacrosse stick.
Subtlety isn't the film's strong suit either; there's a laboured attempt to use a surrounding LA brush fire as a metaphor for race relations. Still, it's the nearest the film gets to catching alight.
• On general release from Friday
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Cameo and Cineworld, Edinburgh; GFT and Cineworld, Glasgow. Other films on general release
The full article contains 809 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
