Those into cinematic arcs of descent could do worse than study the career of Neil LaBute. Once indie cinema’s reigning Old Man Grumpus, (courtesy of 1997’s bruising In the Company of Men), the filmmaker squandered his cred on a series of pictures that took his knack for the bracingly nasty into a steep powerdive, culminating in 2006’s embarrassing-even-by-Nic-Cage-standards The Wicker Man. (Note to readers: Take five seconds to look up the YouTube montage. Please.) Here’s the thing, though: However close to self-parody LaBute’s output eventually came, the underlying venom at least sets it apart from the norm.

The new urban thriller Lakeview Terrace proves that—whatever the state of LaBute’s once-blistering talents—he can now be counted on to make a studio picture more-or-less indistinguishable from anything else on the assembly line. (Um, yay?) It hangs together better than his last few, certainly, but don’t call it a comeback just yet.

David Loughery’s script deviates only slightly from such seminal mid-’90s distrust-the-man staples as Internal Affairs or, especially, Unlawful Entry (a title that I’ll bet LaBute would have given his eyeteeth for). After a mixed-race couple moves into the California suburb of the title, their morally rigid next-door neighbor (Samuel L. Jackson), a cop, does his darndest to scare them off. It’s a loaded subject, which makes it all the more perplexing when LaBute fails to do much with it. Instead, he relies on standard home-invasion gimmicks and Jackson doing his usual—but still amusing—eye-popping authoritarian thing. Only once, during a housewarming party chat gone wrong, do LaBute’s old habits come to the fore and threaten to pin the audience’s ears back. Otherwise, chalk it up as a potentially decent B-picture, stymied by the director’s newfound tendency to stay within the lines. We need him mean, or not at all.

LAKEVIEW TERRACE DIR. NEIL LABUTE | RATED PG-13 | OPENS FRI AT THEATERS EVERYWHERE

Tags: Film, lakeview terrace, Reviews, samuel l. jackson