Review of Civic Duty (2006) by Mike C — 14 Mar 2011

I've seen this movie...twice. Released just five years after 9/11, it was probably not the worst movie to take a classic movie formula, successful already with Hitchcock's Rear Window and the more recent Disturbia, and add a political-terrorist twist. Man has time, man becomes suspicious of neighbor, hilarity ensues.

I really liked Krause in the first few seasons of Six Feet Under so DVRed this long ago. He does alright as the lead, a man who has just lost his job and has too much time and maybe some mental problems. Matchett is attractive and holy cow does she look fantastic in a pair of jeans. But her hair makes me want ramen noodles real bad.

Anyway, knowing the previous two movies of the like, I thought it felt predictable. Then again, it's hard to do something three times and it was pretty low-budget, so I thought maybe a surprise was around the corner. Maybe there was or maybe there wasn't depending on your take, but definitely not the big surprise I thought might happen.

Actually, the movie turned out to be pretty safe. It would have been unacceptable for a well-to-do white guy to just be a racist psychopath. I thought Naga's speech near the end was pretty compelling. What if your wife had been blown to bits by an American tomahawk? What would you do? That is an intriguing question that we don't like to talk about. It was quickly brushed under the rug as a hypothetical, but in the closing scenes, we see that is was probably the reality of Naga's character.

The events of the standoff, I thought, were pretty weak, and I was disappointed that they ended the movie with the newscast (which by the way, the ticker on that fake channel moves the wrong way). Suspicion and vigilance can be a good thing. In this movie, he seemed to have gone too far...until the message became he was right all along. I just think that was the weakest message possible to send.