film | I like to watch

If Hollywood's lazy obsession with modernizing classic lit into high-gloss larks for the mallrat set — i.e., Austen's Emma as Clueless, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night as She's the Man — has finally run its course, it only makes sense that they'd next turn their attention to classic cinema. But shock of shocks: DISTURBIA, a contemporary revamping of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, that still-gripping 1954 landmark of suspense and suspicion, is more creepy-crawly fun than it has any right to be, and most of the credit goes to Shia Labeouf's crackerjack performance in the Jimmy Stewart role. As a troubled teen on summer house arrest for decking his teacher — and the teacher kinda had it coming, honestly — he's a smartass hero worth rooting for. Oh, and he's bright and resourceful, too, never stepping out of the realm of high-school-senior believability, yet (mercifully) sidestepping the dumbass decisions that end up getting many of his slasher-flick peers hacked to bits. You like this kid, and his angsty amateur sleuthing keeps you glued to the screen with a big old dollop of up-your-spine tingle even when Disturbia stumbles into a subpar house-of-horrors endgame.

Co-writers Christopher B. Landon and Carl Ellsworth alter the handicap — Stewart's broken leg for Labeouf's ankle monitor — and if you think that sounds like a downgrade in the dire-incapacitation department, well, OK, you'd be right. But the canniest thing Landon and Ellsworth do is to not confine Labeouf to a wheelchair, which makes him more of a proactive detainee than a helpless victim-in-waiting, which, in turn, gives Disturbia a youthful-malcontent-who-cried-wolf identity of its own. And what a wolf — as the neighbor who's a serial killer in regular-joe clothing (come on, like you expect him to turn out to be a nice guy), The Green Mile's David Morse oozes tightly-wound hostility, and he's so brilliant at keeping the psycho in check that he makes Labeouf's vulnerable, widowed mom (The Matrix's Carrie-Ann Moss) suspect that her son has transitioned from stir-crazy to just plain crazy. True, there's no real surprise to how this all plays out, but the predictable story arc is goosed with the techno-voyeuristic slickness to suck in the Livejournalists and the YouTubers, and, at its heart, it's also got enough old-fashioned spunk to appeal to those folks who don't know what the hell Livejournal or YouTube are. Disturbia's pretty easy to nitpick apart (wouldn't Morse's home emit one ungodly odor?), but it's extremely easier to enjoy. B+