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Highly Overrated But Still Good

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

I had stayed away from these movies, because I had seen too many of em. I finally gave this one a go, and I was not disappointed one bit. Again I've realized just what an exceptional, underrated actor, Jackson is. He fits in with this movie perfectly. Down on the surface, he's not a happy man, and when an interracial couple (Wilson and Washington) move in, this doesn't really help things. I must say the tension and drive of the story is nicely handled. Instead of working from a thriller point of view it works from the antagonist and protagonist, but in a very realistic scenario. Could the reason for cop, Jackson's insurmountable anger and issues, be cause his ex work married a white guy. That had sprung to mind, halfway during the movie, though we never find that out. There are a few predicable instances like, in some cases, you know what ensues next, like Jackson, catching the two making out in their spa. But really what I like about this, is wondering where Jackson will take it next, and how far Wilson, will be pushed before he retaliates. Yes it does have somewhat of a shitty ending, because it's predictable. We need something different, where apart from that, you've got one cool ride of a movie, steered by two likable actors.

Lakeview Terrace is a very poor movie with a dull storyline and an overall uninspired cast.Samuel L. Jackson does a great job and will always be an outstanding actor,but he still wasn't enough to make this movie decent,the only scenes that I really liked were when we got to see his character working for the LAPD,which we saw very little of.Kerry Washington did the best she could with the character she was given,sadly it was a boring character that lacked any interesting personality traits,but I found Patrick Wilson's character very annoying,he wouldn't stick up to Jackson's character and couldn't defend his own household and I found the character unlikeable.Lakeview Terrace is a really slow and mediocre movie that I think people would be better off avoiding.A racist veteran LAPD cop starts a violent campaign of intimidation and harassment against his new neighbours because of their interracial relationship. Best Performance: Samuel L. Jackson Worst Performance: Patrick Wilson

"Lakeview Terrance" is a bizarre film from director Neil Labute. The plot? An interracial couple – Chris and Lisa - enter an affluent suburb and move into a new house. Chris is a caricature of your typical limousine liberal. He's vanilla white, drives a Toyota Prius, is a wannabe environmentalist, went to UC Berkeley, listens to gangster rap and marries a black woman. Lisa's father, a successful black lawyer, despises Chris. Surely his daughter could do better. Lisa is confused; her husband's a saint.Unfortunately for the couple, Samuel motherf*****g Jackson lives next door. Jackson plays Abel, a bigoted cop and psycho authoritarian who detests Chris. He hates interracial couples, despises whites, culture mixing and white privilege. As such, Abel wages an increasingly violent war on his neighbours. This war has led to many declaring the film "offensive, post-racial nonsense". A film about an ultra conservative black man in a position of power and authority who bullies whites and uses his social position to victimise white men? Surely this is a mind-boggling contortion of contemporary racism? Surely it is precisely the opposite which is of priority in the real world? To make matters even more odd, Labute sets his film in Lakeview Terrace, the neighbourhood where Rodney King was beaten up by white cops, an incident which led to huge race riots. What the hell? Labute loves to taunt audiences, but his intentions with Jackson's character seem unclear. The name Abel, of course, refers to "humanity's first victim", the character out of the Bible who is betrayed by his brother and becomes the first murdered man. But are we supposed to view Jackson as a victim? Does the film support this? Or is his name one big joke? Regardless, Jackson is emblematic of a very specific post-racial stance. The idea that "benevolent racism" is okay, that everyone is equal and that the portrayal of a bigoted black man is itself a form of equality and not inherently a racial statement. This is the kind of society in which everyone has the right to everyone else's cultural goods and everyone should be proud that they're advanced enough to accept black people, not only as homeowners, cops and presidents, but racists as well.Late in the film Jackson injects into Chris a little liberal guilt. He tells Chris that he hates the fact that as a white man Chris can arrogantly have whatever or whomever he wants (including black women), without pause, without concern, without having to ask or worry how he might be received by the rest of the world. The issue of Chris having it all is then mirrored to Jackson literally getting to be the white guy. The problem is, he loses his wife and gets shot to death. Even as a white guy, black boy's whipped.The film isn't only about reverse racism, it's reversed all over the place. Consider its Mexican stand off climax which reverses typical action movie "hail of bullets" climaxes, or scenes elsewhere in which Jackson is reprimanded by superiors for "being too violent with a thug", when in actuality he was trying to help the kid out. Would a white cop have gotten away with this? Do Jackson's ravings and moral judgements throughout the film have a point at all? Should we be more sensitive and discerning as to what we co-opt? "Lakeview's" first hour is hilarious and features a nice battle between emasculated macho men, but the film then quickly turns into a routine domestic thriller. The film ignores the historical roots of Jackson's rage – this is a guy old enough to remember forced segregation – and instead opts to paint Jackson as a crazy guy who's fury seemingly stems from nowhere. Does the film further a trend of stigmatising certain people as madmen, thereby only further pushing them out by exclusion, or is it parodying a trend? Does Labute intend the picture to be a giant prank on the audience (which he's done before, so who knows?)? It's always very hard to get a reading on Labute. You're never quite sure if he's being dead-pan satirical or is genuinely an uber uptight Mormon.6.9/10 – Worth one viewing.

A very well made psycho-thriller that stands at the top of a sub-genre kick-started by Adrian Lyne's FATAL ATTRACTION in 1987. LAKEVIEW TERRACE features Samuel L. Jackson in riveting form as the main antagonist, a character who's not only the neighbour-from-hell but a cop-from-hell too (imagine this guy on the beat with Ray Liotta's character from UNLAWFUL ENTRY!). LAKEVIEW TERRACE sidesteps cliché throughout – arguably until the climax, anyway – and delivers plenty of suspense and thrills in its story of a racist-with-a-twist – this time it's Jackson who's the racist, a guy who hates whites.Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington are somewhat bland modern actors, but the quality of the scripts drives them to give fairly good turns here. The film belongs to Jackson in the end, though, and he keeps us watching through thick and thin. Realism is often swept aside in these types of production (I'm thinking of you, PACIFIC HEIGHTS) but not so here. Neil LaBute has made some awful films (in fact his one before this was the dire Nicolas Cage remake THE WICKER MAN) but Lakeview Terrace is an unexpected delight – a high-calibre piece of professional filmmaking that never disappoints.