Lakeview Terrace stars Samuel L. Jackson as an obsessive cop named Abel Turner and Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington as Chris and Lisa, a newly couple moving into the neighborhood.This film is interesting for the portrayal of the characters, although it is a typical predictable cop drama, which has been seen several times. On their side, Chris and Lisa think it's probably a good thing to have a cop living beside them. At first. The ending of the film is somewhat predictable as we knew everything would break lose as it was time to end. It could have been done better with a better twist but it was solid.Lakeview Terrance only problem is that, it is not much of a thriller, as it has been labeled. Samuel L. Jackson's character wasn't creepy or disturbing enough to warrant many thrills, he was more so just uptight, strict and a tough "by the law" officer type. This film falls more under a drama than thriller as it was predictable and a straight up story.

Lakeview Terrace (2008) does have some pretty solid acting performances from Samuel L. Jackson, Kerry Washington, and Patrick Wilson. They all really carry the film and do a great job doing so. The premise is very interesting and intriguing, which is what interested me in it in the 1st place. The tension between characters is great and very real seeming. There are times towards the middle part of the film where it can seem too slow, but it does speed up a good bit towards the end. The violence isn't over the top bloody or graphic, it's well done. The movie has thrilling/suspenseful scenes that will definitely rev up your adrenaline and elevates the movie. But if you ask me, the thing that carries this film, is the actor's performances all throughout it. Great job to the cast! Because to be honest, if the performances here weren't good, this would've gotten a much lower rating than a 7/10.

"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.

For years, Hollywood has tended to shy away from the sensitive subject of racially mixed marriages, but in recent years there have been signs that the taboo has been weakening. "Mirrors", for example, featured a racially mixed couple, and "Lakeview Terrace", another film from 2008, is an "issue" movie centred upon that very theme. (In both films the husband is white and the wife black; Hollywood still seems reluctant to make films dealing with the opposite situation, which is in fact statistically more common in real life).The film takes its title from a racially mixed middle-class neighbourhood in Los Angeles. The central characters are a young interracial couple, Chris and Lisa Mattson, and their next-door neighbour Abel Turner, a black officer with the LAPD, with whom they have a tense, uneasy relationship which soon degenerates into open hostility.The film starts off as an examination of two conflicting lifestyles. Abel, a widowed father of two young children, is considerably older than the Mattsons and is more politically and socially conservative; he is, for example, sceptical about global warming and keen to defend the police against allegations of brutality. He is a strict father, something shown by the way in which he constant corrects his children whenever they make a grammatical error. Chris and Lisa, by contrast, are more cosmopolitan and liberal; it is ironic that Chris, the young white professional, is a fan of hip hop music, generally regarded as the music of working-class urban blacks.Abel is sometimes described as a racist, but his is a specialised form of racism. He is not prejudiced against white people per se; he is happy to live in a racially mixed area, and would have no objection to living next door to an all-white couple, especially if they shared his social attitudes. He does, however, object to mixed marriages, and this is one of the reasons why he dislikes Chris and Lisa. This attitude may derive from an incident in his past. He was widowed when his wife was killed in a road accident alongside her white boss, with whom he believes (possibly incorrectly) she was having an affair.In the second half of the film it turns into an example of what I have come to regard as the "…… from Hell" movie. The basic premise of such films is that the life of the protagonist is turned upside-down by the arrival of a stranger who initially seems friendly but who quickly turns out to be dangerous. (This sub-genre of the thriller enjoyed great popularity in the late eighties and early nineties following the success of "Fatal Attraction", or "One Night Stand from Hell"). In this case it is Abel who is the villain and Chris and Lisa his victims; they may have to some extend provoked him, but his behaviour degenerates from the merely unneighbourly to the criminal to the murderous.I have given Lakeview Terrace a relatively high mark because of the original way in which its ideas are developed in the first part of the film and because of the quality of the acting, especially from Samuel L. Jackson as Abel, or at least the Abel of the early scenes. He is portrayed as a proud man, one with a short temper, but a loving if strict father, doing his best to get his kids off to a good start in life, and Jackson is able to bring out all these facets of his character, as well as hinting at the possible latent violence underlying the surface.Nevertheless it was in my view unfortunate that the scriptwriters and director Neil LaBute allowed the film to turn into a "….from Hell" movie, because the first half is actually much more interesting. Abel might end up as the neighbour from Hell, but at first he himself has several legitimate causes of complaint about the behaviour of the Mattsons. (They have been making love in their outdoor swimming-pool, in full view of Abel's children, and Chris has been flicking cigarette butts over his fence). By slavishly following the conventions of the conventional suspense thriller, the film loses the opportunity to examined the little-explored phenomenon of black conservatism and the way in which it conflicts with the cosmopolitan liberalism of many- both black and white- in the younger generation. It would appear that in Hollywood it is still OK to make a black man the villain, provided that he is sufficiently reactionary to offend against the canons of political correctness. A more conciliatory or nuanced ending might have made for a more interesting film. 7/10