Subtitles:

English (SDH), none (unaccessible)

Extras:

Maybe it was the agoraphobic in Kim Basinger that sparked this empty husk of a survival thriller about a woman forced to leave her upscale suburban home for the mall on Christmas Eve as a means of escaping an abusive husband, only to run afoul of parking lot toughs. An early, lengthy scene of Basinger's Della wandering in visible distress around the crowded mall and stumbling through easy social tests like a coffee-shop order and a stop-and-chat with a college chum effectively conveys battered wife fatigue and was presumably aided by the actress's ability to draw on the habitual skittishness of a lifelong anxiety sufferer. But the movie goes downhill from there, as Della returns to the lot where she's accosted by one of the most implausible street gangs ever seen in a non-comedy.

The extent to which first-time writer-director Susan Montford has her ass kicked by a simple establishing scene, in which baby-faced ne'er-do-well Chuckie (Lukas Haas) and his three grad student-looking cronies appear and begin hassling Della at her car, suggests she'll have a brief career in the big chair or at least one that doesn't require her to lean on her own very limited understanding of dialogue. What ought to be a straightforward scene of harassment repeatedly falls on its face thanks to amateur-hour scripting that calls for the gang members to alternately bicker among themselves—the African-American takes offense when Chuckie calls him "my nigga," for example—and threaten Della with questions like, "How about I aim the gun at your pussy?" that may have seemed tough on the page but are cringe-inducing when delivered by these actors, to this actress, in this context.

 Gary Tooze

November 25th, 2009