In May of 2007, I moved out of my apartment in Culver City immediately following college graduation and moved into a house in the San Fernando Valley with three roommates. The house was everything I could hope for. However, about two weeks after moving into the new house, a group of workers arrived at the empty lot next door and started working on the foundation of a new two-story house. Every weekday morning during that summer, my roommates and I would be awoken at 7 or 8am by those loud workers, banging, clanging, shouting in their foreign voices, and blasting their annoying radio music to their hearts’ content. Cut to November 2008. We’re still at the house. The lot next door has been quieter as of late, but the house is still not finished. There’s still noise. There’s still calamity. Eighteen months later. So let’s just say I understood what characters Chris Mattson (Patrick Wilson) and Kerry Washington (Lisa Mattson) were going through in Neil LaBute’s new movie Lakeview Terrace, which presents a couple moving into a new home in the suburbs and having to deal with their nosy and somewhat insane next-door-neighbor Abel Turner (Samuel L. Jackson). Turner has issues from the first moment the couple (one black, one white) moves in next door, but he doesn’t seem threatening at first. It takes the couple awhile to realize that the family man next door may be rather dangerous. After the failure of his last Nicolas Cage movie The Wicker Man, director Neil LaBute must’ve had an inkling (or an agent nudging him) to do a more commercial film. As a film, it lacks a single original scene. As an entertainment, it works beautifully. I was shocked at how invested I got in this movie, and part of the pleasure is watching Turner’s slow descent into madness that marks a tremendous performance by Jackson. While Wilson and Washington both do honorable jobs in the film, it’s Jackson’s sometimes restrained and sometimes maniacal performance that elevates the material to another level. There’s also a subtle but increasingly brooding stylistic element to the film in which fires can be seen in the distant suburbs but come closer and closer to the street in which the main characters live. In the last thirty minutes, when all Hell starts to break loose, the fire starts to hover right above the street, and we the audience are unsettled both in the story elements and location elements. This is a very straightforward movie, so this unique stylistic choice is a welcome addition. Lakeview Terrace is nothing special, but it’s better than it has any right to be because of the performance by Samuel L. Jackson. Even though the man does seemingly seventeen movies a year, people forget he can at times be a fantastic actor, and he shows his talent in full-force in this involving and exciting film.