Lakeview Terrace (2008) Movie Review

Lakeview Terrace is a thriller that opens with an interesting parallel about racism and has Samuel L. Jackson playing his menacing best. However, after the half-way mark the film ventures into the land of absurdity and ends with an unfocused thud of ending.

Jackson plays Los Angeles police officer Abel Turner, who is also a widowed over-bearing father of two kids. Abel and his family live in a nice neighborhood Lakeview Terrace, which is not a perfect community, but it is satisfying to Abel. However, things change when an interracial married couple of Chris and Lisa Mattson (Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington) move in next door. Chris is white and works for a grocery corporation and loves his wife more than anything. Lisa, like Abel is black, and works in the fashion design industry out of her house and one day wants to start a family with Chris. After an informal introduction, Abel’s dissatisfaction with the new neighbors over their interracial marriage gets out of control to where he will do anything to get them to move out of his neighbor. Chris and Lisa on the other hand cannot call the police about their neighbors mean antics, due to Abel’s loyalty to the men in blue.

Neil LaBute is an indie filmmaker that attempted to go mainstream with his last thriller, a remake of The Wicker Man, which was a horrendous embarrassment. LaBute fares better with Lakeview Terrace, but seems to lose his focus on what was a strong premise by letting the film fall into cliché land full of bad choices. Working from a script by David Loughery and Howard Korder, the first half of the film is really about racism and the racist nature of individuals. The film then shifts from being character driven drama, with some thrills, into trying to be a tense thriller in the realm of a film like Unlawful Entry. The final act of the film is poorly written and executed by LaBute, which it seems that the filmmakers got to the halfway point of the film and just ran out of gas or ideas of where to take the film.

Jackson is solid in his role as Abel Turner and he gets to showcase his darker side. Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington are good actors, but at most they are complementary to Jackson presence on the screen. For some reason Grey Anatomy’s Justin Chambers shows up for a one scene as a acquaintance of Chris and Lisa, but he is practically underused.

Lakeview Terrace’s first half works as a character study in the world of racism and bad neighbors. The second half turns the film into a dunce thriller film about a crazy neighbor that never lets up that is sloppily put together. Too bad, if the film would have stayed on track on what LaBute established in the first thirty minutes, then this might have been a workable film.