The dilemma of sharing a room with a stranger is generally awkward, but not quite as treacherous as living with an obsessive psycho killer as shown in “The Roommate,” which was released in theatres this past weekend.
The beautiful college freshman, Sara Matthews (Minka Kelly), studies fashion at the fictional University of Los Angeles. She immediately becomes friends with some typical and flaky hot girls — sans intellectual value — and socially establishes herself at a fraternity party before finally meeting her roommate.
Rebecca (Leighton Meester) finally appears and takes to Sara like a duck to its parent, following her and rapidly growing attached. She closes herself off to anyone other than Sara and makes it clear that she only wants her roommate as her friend, and vise versa.
Most of the film’s run time is spent depicting Rebecca as clingy and over-protective of Sara without any apparent reason. Sara is seemingly independent and uninteresting; let alone alluring enough to garner such obsessive attention.
After too many obvious hints at Rebecca’s instability, she finally begins to cross the line and force people away from Sara by threats, manipulative lies and physical attacks, such as ripping-out a belly button ring.
Although the violent portion of the film is obviously its core appeal, the unthinkable deeds are acted out poorly and leave too much room for audiences to argue points of logic — like the failure of anyone to contact the police, as well as a complete lack of attempt to fight back against a rather small-stature Rebecca.
To make Rebecca seem even more evil and unstoppable, the lineup of characters gets tangled in student-teacher scandals, lesbian love affairs, indulgent fashion-fantasy moments and a desperate act of animal abuse to build suspense.
Even without the chance of landing such a difficult roommate, reality takes a vacation in this film. The carelessly-cased actors portray teens with virtually perfect lives that they spend neglecting any academic endeavors, even at such a presumably prestigious university. Simply put, these characters are dumb.
Sarah’s thrown-in love story with hunky frat boy Stephen (Cam Gigandet) is obnoxiously flirty and is even more predictable than the slew of murders littered throughout the movie.
The too-good-to-be-true couple hardly reflects the lives of any two college students in the real world. They act more like a married soap-opera couple than two students getting acquainted.
The manufactured suspense-building towards the climax of the “action” finally brings an end that is both typical and expected. Although not much could have been done to create an unexpected ending with the setting and characters, no attempt was made to shock audiences.
This film delivers exactly what anyone would expect from it — no less, and certainly no more. The one-dimensional characters make minimal effort to bring to life an already lackluster, predictable plot. Although this simple-minded tale has a momentarily intriguing idea behind it, it fails to deliver a truly entertaining film and is not worth theater admission prices.
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