It is a known fact that bad things are going to happen to the characters in a David Fincher movie. That is just how it goes, and one of his repeated themes is that the world is a very dark place. With \Panic Room,"" director Fincher yet again plunges us into a dark, seedy world where it always seems to rain, and there is rarely enough light on to make out people's faces.
In ""Panic Room,"" Jodie Foster plays a recently divorced mother who decides to rent an absurdly large mansion just for her and her daughter with the intention of finding other people to rent some of the other rooms soon thereafter. This sets up why she and her daughter are alone in the house when a trio of thieves breaks in to rob the place.
Luckily, she hears them and in a flurry of excitement gets herself and her daughter into the panic room of the house, a room locked by steel doors and cement with seemingly no way of breaking in.
They are safe. Or so they think.
One would think it might be hard to keep this story interesting and moving by setting the entire film in one location, over one night, but Fincher knows how to tell a good story.
Not to say that scriptwriter David Koepp did not have something to do with that as well. Koepp knows how to write a creepy thriller, as was shown with his most recent outing, 1999's overlooked ""Stir of Echoes.""
All of the main plot elements here make sense, and coupled with Fincher's direction, ""Panic Room"" shapes out to be a tightly constructed thriller.
Nicole Kidman was initially going to be playing Foster's role. And though Kidman would surely have been good, Foster returns to the thriller genre in excellent form. Jared Leto, Forest Whittaker and Dwight Yoakam play the three thieves, each bringing their own unique seal to their characters.
It is Fincher that is the real star here, though. His careful direction and daring camerawork help show us things in unique ways that we rarely see elsewhere. Fincher wants to show the audience that the camera can go anywhere. So using some digital wizardry, he is able to make the camera shots flow effortlessly through the house, into key holes and through cracks in the wall.
The only problem here is that the ending should have been worked out more. It is not bad, it just leaves the audience wanting a little more after the rest of the film that was so well-crafted. But those in the mood for a dark thriller should get themselves a seat at the ""Panic Room.""
For every film adaptation of a book, there are the people who think the book was better, and those who feel the opposite. But simply put, readers who enjoy Dave Barry's columns or books ought to buy a ticket for the film adaptation of his 1999 fall-on-the-floor-laughing book ""Big Trouble.""
For five minutes, the film is about an unhappy career-stunted divorced father who is out of touch with his teenage son. Then add two Jersey hitmen, Russian bomb dealers, a corporate jerk with a dissatisfied wife and acerbically mouthy daughter, Starsky and Hutch wannabes, a tree-dwelling modern-day Jesus who loves Fritos and a South American maid.
This eccentric blend of characters continuously crashing into each other comes from the mind of humorist Barry and his book of the same name. However the movie fails to capture all of Barry's incredible humor, because a film can't really relay all of his wonderful pop-culture absurdities. But there are still the goats, the Geo and the toad, but Barry's voice gets lost in the adaptation to film.
But while some of the actors just filled out already fabulous roles handed to them by Barry's writing, many improved on an already hilarious bunch of crazies.
Tim Allen stars in and narrates much of ""Big Trouble"" as Eliot Arnold, the opening scene's main character. Allen's subtle wit and terrific facial expressions hit hard as he stumbles over and over, and then clumsily wins his son's respect (and gets some action) by saving the day.
Janeane Garofalo and Patrick Warburton also liven up slow spots with their quick insults and tough-cop routine. Dennis Farina and Jack Kehler also bring fresh style to a potentially stereotypical mobster routine 'they are intelligent and classy and absolutely bewildered by the weird ways of Miami. And as clueless delinquents, Snake and Eddie, Tom Sizemore and Johnny Knoxville bumble their way through a bomb heist with blank stares and greasy attitudes that substantiate their stupidity.
Any review of ""Big Trouble"" must mention its delayed release, scheduled for soon after Sept. 11, but held until April. As the entire cast chases a nuclear bomb en route to the Bahamas, the humor of lackluster airport security in light of those events seems not less funny, just comedy of a darker kind.
And so, with an articulate script and fabulous actors, ""Big Trouble"" succeeds as a big-name, fully-hilarious film'but the book was still better.
