Knee-jerk review: "Disturbia"

1. You can just hear the Diet-Coke-fueled pitch meeting: "It's Rear Window, see, but for teenagers!" Even so, the movie's smarter than you might expect.
2. Part of the reason is the considerable scruffy charisma of lead Shia LaBeouf.
3. The violent prologue may not be explicit, but it's definitely intense and scary. That's a pretty hard PG-13 scene.
4. David Morse is always good, isn't he?
5. How did Shia LeBeouf's character get his hands on the blueprints for the house next door? LocalBlueprints.com? There's hard to believe and then there's something laughable like this.
6. It's one thing to buy that a serial killer might build an extra room onto his house for grisly deeds, but what's with the creepy giant basement and then the cave-like sub-basement? When would he have time to build all of that? Why would he try to find the time to build all of that?
7. The garage door opener bit is clever.
8. The climax gets a little ridiculous, but that's unfortunately just the way these kinds of things usually end.
9. Sarah Roemer's bikini scenes add, shall we say, extra value.
10. That's a pretty cool title, isn't it?
11. Always fun to see local Los Angeles news anchors pimping themselves out for fake newscasts in movies.
12. Seriously, if you hit someone in the head with an aluminum baseball bat, you're probably going to kill them.

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