Review of Vacancy (2007) by Markb. — 24 Apr 2007

Woe be to any thriller (and its audience) where the biggest and most effective thrills by far appear in the opening and closing credits sequences! By themselves, they're quite marvelous, actually, with the listed names of everyone involved acting as puzzle pieces in a design that suggests a collaboration between Saul Bass and the person who designed the topiary maze in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, scored by Paul Henslinger as though his doctor told him that this would be the last music he'd ever compose, and, by golly, he's gonna make the most of it! Given how torpid, predictable and monotonous most of what follows turns out to be, it's hard to decide whether to congratulate those involved with the credits or sue them for breach of promise.

The plot involves a troubled married couple (dealing with a recent tragedy, but details are deliberately left vague) who, experiencing that good old familiar car trouble that acts as such a reliable fulcrum in movies like this, check into a (literally) ratty old motel that, due to the manager's predilection for filming snuff movies starring previous customers, they might not be able to check out of.

The most interesting filmmaking decision involved with Vacancy is that the time period is extremely difficult to place: for reasons obvious to the plot, no cell phones are employed; the costumes and cars don't tell you much; the radio looks old enough to have played Tommy Dorsey's first Number One hit; the TV Guide in the room is the size and shape of a Reader's Digest, just as God intended, and the technology used in making the snuff films is video, not DVD.

(And given just how dusty and decrepit the motel is--it makes the Bates look like the Fountainbleu--it wouldn't surprise me to know that the videos were Beta, not VHS!) The heroes, Luke Wilson (by far the more bearable of the Wilson brothers and hence far less of a box office draw than Owen) and Kate Beckinsale (who was supposed to become 2001's "It Girl" following the release of Pearl Harbor, but instead was reduced last year to playing Adam Sandler's inflatable doll in Click) are quite good in their early sequences, effectively portraying two people who still care about one another, but still can't resist locating each other's last nerve and stomping on it, while Frank Whaley (Swimming With Sharks) is amusing as the motel guy, finally fulfilling all the inherent creepiness I always thought he possessed even in his sympathetic roles.

Unfortunately, all three are rapidly reduced to climbing and crawling (in Luke's and Kate's cases) and stalking, shooting and slashing (in Frank's), resulting in an 85-minute movie that seems much longer, and whose "ending" is totally nonexistent and fraudulent.

I suspect that a big part of the reason that this is getting so many friendly reviews is that, although dealing with a mass murderer, Vacancy doesn't endlessly dwell on explicit torture scenes in the manner of Hostel, Wolf Creek, Chaos and the Saws.

In light of recent, extremely regrettable events, this is like a college professor giving a student who constantly turns in mediocre work a high grade...because at least he didn't shoot up the campus.