'Terrace' provokes danger, thought

Those who feel the touch of racial tension descends, alarmingly, into racial hatred in the disturbing "Lakeview Terrace." Like 1987's "Fatal Attraction," it is a routine horror flick on the surface but touches buttons that will scare viewers in surprisingly profound ways.

The fact that a black actor is assigned the role of the aggressive, hateful, bigoted villain is in itself something seldom seen in movies. You could take it that pop culture has gotten over its obsession with political correctness. You could just as easily take it as melodramatic cliche. In either case, the first half of "Lakeview Terrace" is dangerous and provocative before it sinks to an ending in which everything is settled by the gun.

Samuel L. Jackson's performance is furious, even though it amounts to little more than the evil eye alternated by the wicked smile. But it is enough to make him one of the more disturbing screen villains since the mop-headed guy in last year's "No Country for Old Men." Jackson is over the top, which apparently is where he likes to be as an actor. Nonetheless, Abel Turner, the macho Los Angeles cop he plays, whips us up to the extent that this silly movie manages to suggest that civilization itself hangs by the thread.

Abel is irritated that an inter-racial couple, a liberal white yuppie and a wealthy black woman, have moved in next door. He seethes when he peeps through the shutters and sees them cavorting nude in the pool.

"We didn't even crawl out of the same evolutionary womb," he mutters to the husband whom he scares by faking a holdup in the driveway.

Noticing that his neighbor listens to rap music by choice, he growls: "You can listen to that noise all night long, but when you wake up in the morning, you'll still be white."

Harassment and humiliation follow as Abel denounces the couple as an example of "Brave New World" and forbids his children to have anything to do with them.

The plot gets a little silly, though, in that there are too many "outs" that the audience can see through to avoid what is portrayed as a trap. Abel keeps his neighbors from sleeping by shining spotlights into their bedroom. Couldn't this have been solved by putting up curtains? The husband comments, as if he were reading our mind, that "we need a brick wall, not curtains."

The couple's garage is invaded and tires are slashed. Their air-conditioning unit is sabotaged. When Abel is invited over as a friendly gesture, he makes it clear that he sees aggression as the only way to solve a problem. Sneering, he taunts the husband by suggesting, "Why don't you call the police?"

Patrick Wilson, as the husband, is a hunk who spends much of the movie with his shirt off and his mind in naive status. Wilson has proved that he is a fine actor via roles in "Little Children" in 2006 and the award-winning 2003 TV series "Angels in America." He should have been a major star by now, but his quiet, bland assignment here will not be a help.

Wilson is a Norfolk native, the son of John Wilson who was news director and anchorman for WAVY-TV back in the 1970s. Playing the victim here is a somewhat thankless task.

Kerry Washington plays his wife. Aside from the neighbor, they face trouble in that she wants a child right away. He doesn't. This subplot gets in the way of the central threat.

Director Neil LaBute clearly has more on his mind than just making another version of 1992's "Unlawful Entry." His 1997 movie debut, "In the Company of Men," depicted men as supremely cruel in their search for sex. It still ranks as the film that made women so mad they would have liked to burn down the theater.

His "Your Friends and Neighbors" from 1998 depicted well-educated yuppies as a pack of hypocrites who lived to dominate each other. All in all, he's a troublemaker - the type of director we could use more of to wake audiences out of their usual escapist search.

"Lakeview Terrace," though, sinks to the cliches of its genre in its second half. Trying to elevate things to a fever pitch with no more than a noisy party next door seems a bit lame. It goes over the top when Wilson's character runs over to participate in the stripper entertainment.

Another "out" surfaces when it is revealed that Abel is in trouble at the police department over brutal arrests. Under these conditions, wouldn't our couple perhaps have had a chance of being heard if they had gone to the police, A suspense thriller of this type demands isolation of a "no way out" type. Particularly weak is a last-minute nod toward "humanizing" Abel. (H is hatred was fueled by the fact that a white man was driving the car when his wife was killed. He suspects an affair might have been involved.)

The script by David Loughery and Howard Korder is based, ostensibly, on a much-publicized Los Angeles case in which a black cop harassed interracial couples.

When you get down to the details of plotting, "Lake-view Terrace" falters. Before that, though, it knows how to jerk the leash of its audience.

Mal Vincent, (757) 446-2347, mal.vincent@pilotonline.com