Panic Room

PANIC ROOM

Rating: B

Predictable but enjoyable thriller.

Supposedly, "panic rooms" are all the rage now. Feel the need for a secret, secure room in your house, where you can hide if an intruder breaks in? Me neither. Remember how we used to laugh at those naive bumpkins back in the '50's who built bomb shelters in their basements? Well, the bomb shelters are back.

Anyway, recently-divorced Jodie Foster buys new digs in a Manhattan brownstone, and sure enough, a panic room comes as an added feature just off the master bedroom. Most people would've been content with a walk-in closet. Sadly, most panic room buyers never actually get to use their investment, staying home night after night vainly hoping for the home intrusion that never comes. However, Jodie and her daughter (Kristen Stewart) get to employ theirs on their very first night in the building, when Forest Whitaker and two other thugs (Jared Leto and Dwight Yoakam) drop in unannounced. Is that dumb luck, or what? Speaking of her daughter, it took me halfway through the movie before I finally realized her "son" was a she. I'll admit I thought it a little weird when he had a towel wrapped around his head like women do after they've washed their hair, but other than that, the usual indicators of femalehood are noticeably absent. When Foster started calling him "Sarah," I got a little suspicious. Later, when Foster referred to him as "my daughter," I decided that settled the matter. Maybe.

Given the limits of the initial premise, you can probably guess the course of the plot. I mean, you've got Jodie and her daughter holed up inside their panic room (and appropriately panicking), while Forest and the gang skulk around outside trying to get in. To his credit, director David Fincher keeps the material interesting, and the tension admirably taut throughout. Along the way, he throws in some imaginative opening credits, and some camera gymnastics that either gave the cinematographer a hard-on or made him long for early retirement.

There's the prerequisite scene where the police finally arrive, and Foster must meet them at the door and pretend that nothing is wrong, because if she doesn't the bad guys will kill her daughter and her houseplants. The cops bend over backwards, forwards, and sideways to give her every opportunity to surreptitiously signal them if anything is amiss, but of course she doesn't. There's no real logic as to why she doesn't, other than it's still too early in the movie. I think scenes like this are meant to deliberately irritate the audience by dangling the carrot in front of us and then snatching it away. The ploy didn't work on me this time because it's old and tired, and plus I was too busy noticing how much Jodie Foster looks like Michael J. Fox in a wig. This is not particularly good news for either of them. Which leads me to question why Foster is portrayed in this film as some kind of object of sexual desire. Is it really normal for a woman in her forties to sleep in a top which exposes more cleavage than Jennifer Love Hewitt working the street corner on a Saturday night? I really didn't need to see that when I was trying to eat popcorn.

In the "how stupid do they think we are?" department, there's a scene where the goons flood the panic room with propane gas in an attempt to flush our heroines out. Foster solves the problem by, um, lighting a match. I'm not kidding. Instead of the entire room erupting into an instant crematorium, the explosion considerately confines itself to the upper half of the room, while Foster and Stewart huddle safely underneath. Give me a break. Ask someone who's ever endured a natural gas explosion if that's the way a flammable gas behaves. Not to mention that propane gas is heavier than air. Then one bad guy's sleeve catches fire, and the material continues to burn with a blue flame as if it were propane. Physics majors these filmmakers were not.