The Movie: I didn't really know what this movie was about when I put it in my Netflix queue, but I believe the system recommended it to me. All I really knew about it was that Tim Robbins was in it, and I figured I like him enough, so I might as well give this movie a shot. Well, I guess I found out that this movie was really more about Jeff Bridges' character than it was about Tim Robbins' character.

Jeff Bridges plays a university professor who teaches a class on terrorism in America, whose wife, an FBI agent, was killed in a botched raid, and he's never really forgiven the government for letting that happen. But, life goes on, and he tries to get on with his life. One day, he saves the life of a boy who lives across the street from him -- neighbors he had never even talked to before, and the two families become friends. But some things don't seem right, and whether it's just paranoid suspicion, or if it's for real, Jeff Bridges begins to suspect that his neighbors are not exactly who they seem to be.

This movie takes quite a long while to get going, in fact, two-thirds of the way through it I was still wondering when anything was going to actually happen. As you might expect from a movie of this type, there are a number of plot twists, but many of them seemed rather forced, and just didn't flow well, almost as if someone had said "well, X number of minutes have gone by, time for a plot twist!" The ending however, I do have to admit was not expected, and quite riveting.

I was rather disappointed by Tim Robbins' performance, which seemed very flat and lifeless, though I thought Joan Cusack was perfect for her role. As far as Jeff Bridges goes, whenever I hear his voice, I can never think of him as anyone other than "The Dude" from The Big Lebowski, which is rather unfortunate, because I really didn't like that movie very much.

And so, while the ending was everything a director could want in the ending of a suspense/thriller type film, I'm not sure the rest of the movie was really worth it, so I have to rate this movie as average overall.

The DVD: As you can see by the ratings of "2" across the board, this DVD was, well, average. The anamorphic transfer was nice and bright, but seemed a bit noisy, and exhibited some gradient banding near the beginning of the film where a lot of blur and fog effects were used (which are typically challenging types of images to encode). The rest of the film did not suffer so much, as it was pretty much devoid of any such visual effects.

The audio was also nice and bright, although I felt the overall levels were too low (I really had to crank up the volume to hear what was going on), and the surround soundstage was rather flat and uninspiring. Special features include a theatrical trailer, a behind the scenes featurette, audio commentary with the film's director and Jeff Bridges, and an alternate ending with a rather long-winded introduction by the director. The alternate ending was not quite so "alternate" as I would have liked, and was quite bad, and it's pretty obvious why they didn't use it.

So this is about as average as things get. Average movie, average video, average audio, and average features.