Ah, Panic Room by David Fincher, I have seen it a couple of times, it’s basically another movie involving a heist that goes awry with Foster (Meg Altman) and her daughter Sarah Altman (Kristin Stewart) thwarting the effort of three would thieves into her house.
Of course Fincher doesn’t make this a typical heist movie. He adds a bit of paranoid messages into the film making it pretty interesting till the end. For instance, the heist in question involving the three thieves Burnham (Forest Whitaker), Raul (Dwight Yoakam), and Junior (Jared Leno) breaking into an unbreakable house which has a ’’panic room’’ (an unbreakable room for emergency). The ’’panic room’’ is like the 1990’s version of the 1950 version of a panic room which paranoid people in that time used because of the so called threat of nuclear war. lol
The dilemna here is that Meg and her daughter are at the house at the same time the thieves are coming in. So Meg and Sarah hide in the ’’panic room’’ which yes hides the fortune the thieves are after. So while the thieves are trying to break into the panic room, the Altman’s are trying to break out of the room (because the room is cutting of oxygen) and to contact the police for help.
Fincher does managed to established a great clautrosphobic ( I think I spelled it right) atmosphere enabling to gasp for our breathes while Meg and Sarah try to conserve their last ones. The lighting of the movie also a certain atmosphere as well, as most of the shots in the movie look dark and gloomy giving us more chills and spills.
The acting is great Jodie Foster does another fine performance in her career, which I have admired for a long time. Here she pulls of the single mother fighting for the life of her daughter routine very well. She likes all her other roles, does gives that tough edge that makes her characters so real.
Kristen Stewart is good too although she doesn’t get too many lines.
Forest Whitaker as Burnham and Jared Leno as Junior are the lead thieves who gives some laughs in between especially when these collide with another as to their next plan of attack on Meg.
Burnham is a good character. Whats starts out as a typical thief, turns into a sympathetic character of a thief who perhaps is sick of the life of crime he has led, while Junior represents the most typical violent thief even, someone who continually robs and kills people with no conscience. He is another words like these guys on ’’America’s Most Wanted’’ who gets profiled like a million times, almost taking pride in the fact that he loves being a menace to society
’’Panic Room’’ by David Fincher is then obviously more than just a heist movie, Fincher puts in some critical factors that prevent from being just a standard crime movie. The characters are different than you would get in a typical movie of this genre. The acting is good, the suspense is good and overall the movie is good.
Check it out, and if you have a DVD player, check out the Special Edition DVD release of ’’Panic Room’’