Lakeview Terrace

I expected trashy, but this mish-mash of Cape Fear & Crash lacks any through-line. Sometimes it’s suspenseful, and sometimes it seems like the characters can’t remember what happened in the preceding scene. Sam Jackson’s coming at them with a chainsaw one minute, the next minute they’re all chummy having drinks. The script feels like a product of development meetings. Some adolescent USC grads trying to get their newbie fingerprints on a script to prove they’re valuable to their boss. (i.e. parents’ tennis buddy.) In the late 80’s and early 90’s these kinds of thrillers were a dime a dozen. Here, they fail to spice up the recipe by trying to make the villain sympathetic. It’s too bad it couldn’t be what it wanted to be about: racism.