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100I find movies like this alive and provoking, and I'm exhilarated to have my thinking challenged at every step of the way.
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100Lakeview Terrace isn't literally about the riots, but it's still one of the toughest racial dramas to come out of Hollywood since the fires died down--much tougher, for instance, than Paul Haggis's hand-wringing Oscar winner "Crash."
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80As a thriller it's solid three-star tension. As a Samuel L. Jackson showcase it proves a man can only coast through so many motherfuckin' or milquetoastin' turns before having to display his full and overpowering talent.
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75A conventional suspense thriller, but the details kick it up a notch.
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70A pretty provocative film, that is until it implodes into standard formulaic Hollywood crap.
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63Lakeview Terrace holds your interest, though the bad faith on all sides makes it something of an endurance test.
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63Here's a vote of gratitude for Samuel L. Jackson, who has become a specialist in making mediocre movies far more entertaining than they should be.
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60Delivers fairly tense and engrossing drama before succumbing to thriller convention.
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50The main problem with this treatise on racial politics undercover as an exercise in suspense is that the director, Neil LaBute, didn't write the script.
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50One wishes LaBute, a bleak satirist and, at his best, a crudely compelling dramatist, had taken the script and made it his own sort of twisted comedy instead of a routine thriller
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50Lakeview Terrace's pretense at exploring racial intolerance has been exposed for what it really is: a B-movie copout.
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50Tediously predictable thriller.
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50Anyone who has ever had an annoying neighbor will see their worst nightmares fulfilled in the overheated but entertaining Lakeview Terrace.
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50In pandering to Hollywood standards about how stories like this should unfold, LaBute has lost his edge.
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Like a lot of better genre fare, Lakeview Terrace uses its predictable premise to mount a stealth attack on the audience's sensibilities.
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Jackson modulates Abel's internal turmoil and heated exchanges with enough shades of loneliness, steely generosity and wicked playfulness to give the actor firm control of our fascination and growing unease.
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50A passable piece of hackwork, with some adequately suspenseful passages and a few mild shocks near the end. But the psychological dimensions of the story are so risible, and its supposed insights into race and class so wrongheaded and ugly, that irritation trumps enjoyment.
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50It's a shame, then, that the later stages of Lakeview Terrace should overheat and spill into silliness. The plot is compromised, not resolved, by the pulling of a gun.
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Jackson is the best thing here.
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42Grabs a fistful of hot-button story elements -- race, sex, politics -- and promptly mixes them into the thriller equivalent of tapioca.
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42When a film has to blare its racially and incendiary stance as obviously as Lakeview Terrace, you know it's trying too hard.
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42Ultimately, Lakeview Terrace isn't about race so much as it's about being a man, which has been LaBute's fallback theme from the start.
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The film, absent a sense of place and populated by repellent or weak characters, soon devolves into an increasingly foul litany of events.
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40The same boring routine gets played out again.
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Boilerplate stuff through and through.
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38Starts out mixing social burlesques and melodrama and ends up one more failed thriller about men behaving badly - and stupidly.
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25The whole thing is so listless and mechanical, watching it is a curiously dispiriting experience. You start hoping someone whips out a bear suit.
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25The movie might have something to say about black racism, but the conversations go nowhere, and the cliches of the genre take over.
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10Joyless and airless suspense thriller.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 8 out of 13
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Mixed: 1 out of 13
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Negative: 4 out of 13
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8
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A movie about police brutality, overprotection of children, and racism regarding biracial relationships. A terrific performance by Sam L. Jackson.
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