Lakeview Terrace
YOU can see Samuel L Jackson almost licking his lips in pleasure at his juiciest role in a while in Lakeview Terrace, directed by Neil LaBute.
It’s a suspenseful thriller in which Jackson plays the bad guy, a tightly wound Los Angeles cop, Abel Turner, who can’t stomach the inter-racial marital bliss of his new neighbours: nice, middle-class white boy Chris (Patrick Wilson) and his black partner Lisa (Kerry Washington).
He is, in effect, a racist, giving this neighbour-from-hell picture a compelling twist. There may be no reasonable justification for Abel’s prejudice but that does not prevent him from being a compelling character: a stickler for observing the law, even as he breaks it himself.
His venom is deliciously twisted and laced with dark humour. When Chris drives home from work listening to rap music Abel taunts: “You can listen to that stuff all night long but when you wake up you’ll still be white.”
Abel’s needling becomes increasingly overt and exposes fault lines in Chris and Lisa’s relationship. Of course, since he is a cop, the odds against the couple are stacked even further.
This kind of thriller often falls down in the final act, lurching into absurdity or melodrama, but Lakeview Terrace builds to a clever climax, even if an approaching Californian forest fire is an unnecessarily heavy-handed metaphor.
The performances are the real treat here with Jackson on barnstorming form, while Wilson is equally watchable as a flawed nice guy.
HENRY'S VERDICT 4/5
Certificate 15, 106 minutes
