Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
4/23/07
It's
April, so indulge me in a little baseball metaphor. Like a team with
a great starting rotation but no bullpen, Vacancy spends about 25
minutes carefully setting up two sympathetic characters and a creepy situation,
cuts loose with a half hour of first-rate empty calorie adrenaline, and
then... blows it. I can imagine the movie sealing the deal while
ending exactly the same way it does, but in a dozen little ways, it just
fails to execute the fundamentals that make thrillers like this work.
Amy
(Kate Beckinsale) and David Fox (Luke Wilson) are driving home from their
final social engagement as a married couple: they've agreed to tell
no one they're getting a divorce until the papers are signed. But
David pulls off a crowded Interstate to take a “shortcut” and soon enough
they're lost. Then comes car trouble, and a friendly Mechanic (Ethan
Embry) who helps them out. About a mile further down the road, the
car finally gives out, and the bickering couple is forced to walk back
to the garage looking for help. It's closed for the night, but the
Motel next door has plenty of available rooms, as the creepy manager (Frank
Whaley) informs them. From almost the moment they take up residence
in the filthy Honeymoon Suite, weird things start happening. The
phone rings, but there's no one on the other end. Someone pounds
on their door, then runs into the next room. And David finds a stack
of video tapes on top of the TV which show brutal murders... taking place
in that very room. So begins a long night with David and Amy struggling
to defend all entrances and exits while finding a way to get away from
the Pinewood Motel before starring in the killers' next snuff film.
If
only one of those tapes on top of their TV had been Breakdown, the
nifty 1997 Kurt Russell thriller that tells a very similar tale of a married
couple playing a deadly game with a group of heartless killers. It
succeeds virtually everywhere Vacancy falls flat. Let's start
with the killers. As you can see from the credits above, Vacancy
has only three characters with names, and it's got two more killers than
that (in fact, one character is billed in the credits only as Killer).
While their monstrous, sadistic setup demands their deaths (actually it
begs a little more payback than they ultimately get), it's hard to really
root passionately against such a faceless group (literally, as Killer never
even takes off his mask). Beckinsale and Wilson make
a winning couple, and the film was able to make me care about their survival
both as people and a couple, but when a plot twist around the 2/3 mark
splits them up, it puts the weight of the remaining drama on the character
least able to handle it alone. Plus, while the middle half hour is
a well-scripted chess game in which the Foxes struggle to learn the rules
and the layout and use both to their advantage, after that twist all bets
are off and what remains is a frantic, mostly silent struggle to be the
last person left standing.
And
then come the final five minutes. I'm just guessing, but I'd be kinda
surprised to learn that there's NOT an alternate cut of Vacancy
that goes on at least a few minutes longer than the one that's been released.
I didn't have a remote control to go back and be certain that I'd seen
what I thought I had, but I'd swear there's at least one too many hearts
still beating when the film cuts to black for it to truly be over.
Plus, there's another last-minute development that tries to give me what
I wanted, but comes too late and too lame to be satisfying.
All
this is a shame because for a while, Vacancy is a solid and exciting
thriller. Director Nimrod Antal and his cinematographer Andrzej Sekula
frame their stars in a claustrophobic, unforgiving night that makes them
seem trapped even before their troubles start. Antal has a good sense
of pacing and tension in the build-up, and the brutal snuff videos we see
do a wonderful job of setting the appalling stakes. But in the end,
the movie's just in too much of a hurry: that failure to tell us
anything about who the villains really are (again, watch Breakdown's
couple scenes of J.T. Walsh and his family to see how it's done) comes
back to haunt in a big way. Even the layout of the motel (nifty rats
aside) proves to be kinda dull once David and Amy finally learn it.
And what's the deal with them searching a key room once and finding nothing
to use as a weapon, only to have the same room crawling with sharp and
blunt objects for the big finale?
One
of those movies you might enjoy watching once if you're not all that demanding,
Vacancy
squanders a great concept and a couple of winning star turns. Maybe
it thinks its' done enough in setting up its' dominoes, and that they'll
knock themselves over. Maybe the filmmakers had something different
in mind than what test audiences forced them to cut their footage into.
Or maybe they just needed to drop a big truck on somebody (apologies to
anyone who hasn't seen Breakdown...). Either way, Vacancy
takes only 85 minutes to go from intriguing to thrilling to blah.
Better luck next time. |
