Domestic Disturbance

DOMESTIC DISTURBANCE

Rating: C

An undistinguished B movie, with indifferent acting.

You know how there's a scene in every B-grade stalker movie where the hero hears someone trying to get in through a locked door, cautiously opens the door to find an empty hallway, then closes it again and BAM - the boogeyman somehow is now in the room with them? Well, nothing says more about Domestic Disturbance than the fact it has one of these scenes in it. You can wonder all you want how David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear - I want to know how the boogeyman always gets in the room.

Here, it's Vince Vaughn's turn to be the bad guy. He marries John Travolta's ex-wife, and reluctantly inherits Travolta's son (Matthew O'Leary) as part of a package deal. Travolta, not exactly thrilled about it to begin with, really gets suspicious when an oddly out-of-place man (Steve Buscemi) shows up at the wedding uninvited. Sensing his son and ex-wife may be in danger, he begins digging into Vaughn's past.

What starts out as a promising thriller for the modern broken family soon lapses into predictability. At least, it's predictable in the spots when it isn't being downright implausible. I would hope that if I ever told the police I witnessed a murder, they might actually do some investigating before branding me a liar. But if people acted rationally here, the film would be over in fifteen minutes. Travolta's acting has been better in other movies, and Vaughn seems to be barely there, suggesting they sensed early on that this film wasn't worth expending a lot of effort over. In Vaughn's defense, his character is so one-dimensional he doesn't have much to work with.

In a couple of early scenes, Travolta is shown choosing a soft drink instead of an alcoholic beverage. This is screenwriter talk for "this guy is a former drunk." He might as well be wearing an Alcoholics Anonymous T-shirt. Next time a waitress asks you if you'd like a drink from the bar, and you instead choose a Coke, know that in her mind a little voice is sniping, "Aha! A lush!" Then refuse to leave a tip because of her lousy attitude.

Some computer languages are known as "object oriented," which means common procedures are built right into the code instead of the programmer having to recreate them with each new program he writes. I only mention this because I think it's high time Hollywood considers "object oriented" filmmaking. For example, instead of filming Travolta's son and ex-wife struggling to get the car out of the garage before Vaughn catches them, the filmmakers could simply splice in the identical scene from The Glass House. Or instead of recreating the aforementioned "locked door" sequence, the filmmakers could merely insert one of the 10,000 times it's been done before (strictly speaking, 10,001 times now). Before long, movies could consist entirely of reconstituted footage. Production costs would plummet, meaning they could pass the savings on to us viewers. So you could theoretically spend $4.50 to see a crummy movie instead of shelling out nine bucks. Wouldn't that be great?