'Lakeview Terrace': Cliches in Black and White

Los Angeles brush fires rage in the distance as the opening credits roll in "Lakeview Terrace," and it doesn't take much imagination to guess that the fires are going to get closer as the movie, ah, heats up.

This is good because our perky interracial couple at the heart of the movie, Chris and Lisa Mattson (Patrick Wilson, "Little Children," Kerry Washington, "Ray") don't generate many sparks of their own. But saving the party is their flame-throwing cop next door, Abel Turner (the always dependable Samuel L. Jackson).

For the most part "Lakeview" is your standard-issue eccentric-neighbor-next-door-gets-weird, then menacing, then scary and then downright nasty in the final reel kind of flick. The twist here is that the ever-so-reasonable couple being picked on is a white husband and a black wife. Their tormentor is not a white racist, but an angry black man -- who's a cop! How ironic!

Well, maybe not.

Jackson sails right into the role of a cop and a single dad, who really, really, doesn't like white guys hooked up with sistahs. It's pretty much worth the price of admission to watch his Turner saunter off after scaring the daylights out of uptight Chris in an early scene.

The drag is that director Neil LaBute ("The Wicker Man," "In the Company of Men") couldn't come up with anything original in our Interracial Couple, which the film presents as an entity that still draws arched eyebrows. In this movie formula, Mr. White Guy is a grocery store exec who went to Berkeley on a lacrosse scholarship but is still hip to black culture (rap, in this case). Mrs. Black Chick is rich and preppy and wears a weave and is, you know, a long way from the 'hood. In this kind of movie formula, whenever an interracial couple gets stressed, all the race stuff comes out, as if it had been swept under the couch all along.

Here, things get bumpy and Chris complains that "I get it" from "black guys" all the time about his marriage, and that he's "tired of being on the front line." To which his spouse predictably responds, "You have no idea."

While you're waiting on the plot to get back to Jackson, you might pass the time by wondering, as I did, about Hollywood's recent fondness for, when it comes to interracial relationships, pairing white men with black women. Ask a demographer and you'll hear that the reverse is more common, at least in this country, but the big screen seems to prefer it the other way around. You've got your rom-coms ("Something New," "Guess Who"), your brilliantly moving ("Monster's Ball"), your thrillers ("The Truth About Charlie," "The Score"), the ridiculous ("Bringing Down the House") and the adulterous ("The Family That Preys").

Our couple sticks it out to confront the bad-cop and worse cliches, like Chris being taunted if he's "man enough" to take care of a black woman. Well, Mr. White Guy is darned plucky, I'll tell you!

"Lakeview" isn't a bad popcorn movie -- it's hard not to like Jackson in almost anything -- but you may leave the theater wishing its hot young couple had packed a little more heat.

Lakeview Terrace (110 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG-13 for intense thematic material, violence, sexuality, language and some drug references.