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HORROR: Arlington Road
REVIEWER: Shane Gavin
RATING: A+
REVIEW:
Amazing opening sequence from the latest in Hollywoods new wave of
writers. Ehren Kruger is a writer that you will need to keep your eye on.
Later this year Kruger has 2 other big films releasing that he wrote or
co-wrote including "Reindeer Games" and the gossip spreading
controversial over-writing of the project that fellow writer Kevin Williamson
left called "Scream 3". The film deals with paranoia and the
neighbour next door in a similar way to the films "Fright Night"
and "The Burbs" but this is by no means a comedy. It may come
off from a synopsis like a Bruckheimer "What if?" film but it
is by no means as military based. The film deals blatantly with Terrorism.
This decade has seen a bunch of films that are associated with terrorists,
including "Speed", "Blown Away" and the fisrt film
that Dreamworks made (And possibly still the best that they have made)
"Peacemaker". As far as Terrorist flicks go I would call "Peacemaker"
the film of the decade. If I didn't see "Arlington Road". However
to bad Peacemaker. Jeff Bridges play his usual roll of a run down bloke
trying to piece his life back together with bits nad pieces of his haunted
past. intil one day he comes across a boy who has had his hand burnt in
a firework accident. There is the point where the character he plays, Michael
Faraday begins to look too deeply into his neighbours path.
The Neighbours are played by Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack. Robbins is
possibly in his greatest roll since Darabont' s"Shawshank...."
and directer Mark Pellington (Going All the Way, Destination Anywhere)swings
his charater around the camera through innocence and guilt with a style
that does not often gel with a terrorist type of film. Yet Pellington has
not really tackled a film of this calibre before, (although the suicide
in "Going All the Way" was quite horrific) he manages to pull
off perhaps one of the most challenging an compelling car chases of recent
times.
The story and film have possibly sprung from the popularity of shows
like "Profiler" and "Millennium" where the enemy is
humanity and all it's flaws rather than a masked man with a carving knife
(But I guess you could read some kind of humanity thing into such narratives).
Essentially to miss Arlington Road is to miss one of the most horrifying
accounts of terrorism that has been translated to the screen EVER.
It is because of the FEAR and dissalussionment that this film is meant
to put into and audience that I justify calling it a horror film. This
same justfication also plays over to the reason I give it an A+ despite
a fairly mediocre FBI flashback sequence near a cabin. Fear thy Neighbor.
A+
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, 1998-1999.