| VACANCY |
 2007 - USADirector: Nimród Antal
- Reviewed by Vickie
Directed by Nimród Antal, who also helmed the gloomy and atmospheric subterranean subway thriller Kontroll, Vacancy gets off to a decent start (the world’s worst chit-chat dialogue filler notwithstanding). Kate Beckinsale and Luke Wilson co-star as bickering married couple Amy and David Fox, whose marriage is in the toilet after the death of their young son. On the way home from a visit with Amy’s parents, the Foxes find themselves lost, with a broken-down car, on a remote stretch of rural road. Very reluctantly, they seek shelter in what is arguably the worst motel they’ve ever seen in their lives, which is run by a creepy, shifty, jittery manager (Frank Whaley), who behaves a bit like Norman Bates on speed. Once ensconced in their utter hole of a room, the unhappy couple turn on the TV and make a shocking discovery—their disgusting “suite” is, in fact, a makeshift studio where all the previous guests have become snuff-film victims (in decidedly gruesome ways). Think: the Saw washroom, only with an ugly bedspread and dated furniture. Amy and David then engage in a tense, desperate, perilous battle of half-wits with the ne’er-do-wells running the show in an effort to avoid suffering the same grisly fate as the room’s past visitors. As mentioned, the best parts of Vacancy are in its first two-thirds. There are genuine scares and, like Kontroll, some gorgeously dark (literally) cinematography. The tension is cranked up slowly as Amy and David try to outsmart their homicidal captors, and the filmmakers demonstrate that they really know how to work a single location—save for the opening scenes, the entire film takes places in and around the deserted motel. It really feels like it will be an amazing thrill ride of a movie. It isn’t. Cracks in the cinematic armor start to show fairly early on and explode by the time the action reaches its climax. Bad dialogue abounds almost from the get-go, but it’s forgivable in the beginning because you’re distracted by the action. But, by the end, the audience is left with tired, uncreative writing that features exchanges like a character simply screaming “you f**king bitch! you f**king bitch!” over and over and over again. There’s also some logistical lameness that make Amy and David seem stupid: for starters, upon discovering that their room is rigged with cameras, why do they not immediately destroy or cover the cameras? It’s not until several scenes, and a few near-death encounters, later that David finally throws a grimy towel over the lenses and starts to whisper his plans. After a while, I also found the repeated footage of the (occasionally graphic) snuff films to be needlessly excessive. We get it. People were slaughtered in the room. Move on. As the story progressed, I started to have more questions than answers: how did all these travelers wind up at this motel? Amy and David stopped due to car trouble as the result of nearly hitting a raccoon on the road... a seemingly random incident... so was the raccoon in on the evil plan? Does the manager just sit there, day after day, week after week, month after month, hoping someone might swing by? With all these murders, do none of the victims’ friends or families ever trace their lost loved ones to the area, and are the local authorities that useless that they haven’t noticed the number of mysterious disappearances at the Pinewood Motel? Perhaps the biggest mistake, though, are the choices Frank Whaley or the director or both of them made for his character, who is sooooooooo over-the-top—with his sneers and his ugly glasses and his nebbish demeanor—that you can’t help but laugh at him when he’s onscreen. He’s not menacing so much as ridiculous, and he only gets worse with each passing minute. Unfortunately, before you know it, the movie’s just... over. Thud. The end. It’s extremely short—barely 85 minutes long, including the credits—and I wondered if it might have been better if they’d added 10 minutes of explanation somewhere along the way. What started out with such promise wound up, as so many films do, falling apart the closer it got to its less-than-impressive, and unintentionally laughable, final act and a final shot that feels like it was tacked on as a result of preview-screening test scores. |
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All five of the slices I’m giving this movie are for its first hour,
which is taut, tense and nicely scary. The last 20-30 minutes? Not so
much.
