t’s a shame about the direction Neil Labute’s film career has gone in recent years. The man burst onto the scene the incendiary double act of In The Company Of Men and Your Friends And Neighbors, only to be reduced to directing genre trash like his Nicholas Cage-starring abomination The Wicker Man (a movie so bad that it actually tarnishes the original). While the emotional violence and hard truths that define his career as a playwright appeared in full force in those early efforts, Labute confined that interesting work to the stage after directing the memorable black comedy Nurse Betty. Ever since then, he’s been attempting to direct other people’s screenplays with diminishing returns. His strength is his writing and he shouldn’t be trying to be a director for hire.

Lakeview Terrace is a curious movie to watch in this context. Although the screenplay is credited to David Loughery and Howard Korder, Labute has admitted that he did substantial rewrites and that is all too clear in the first half of the film. It feels like the first real Neil Labute film in years until the movie falls apart in the final reel when all of the human anguish and rising tensions are quickly disposed of with a silly and unbelievable shoot out. The last act feels like paint-by-numbers Hollywood plotting and is very disappointing after all the compelling drama that led to that point.

The movie stars a grizzled Samuel L. Jackson as a retired cop who recently lost his wife and is forced to raise his two children alone in a large mansion on—you guessed it—Lakeview Terrace. His life seemingly falls apart when a young couple, Chris Mattson (Patrick Wilson) and Lisa (Kerry Washington), move in next door. He takes an immediate dislike to the interracial couple and does everything he can to make their lives miserable. At first this takes the form of being an irritating neighbor by pointing his security lights at their bedroom window, but gradually Jackson’s actions take on a more sinister tone. And with him being a cop, the Mattsons have nowhere to turn. It’s never completely clear why Jackson bears such ill will towards the couple, but that moral ambiguity only makes his behavior more disturbing and fascinating.

It is this precise moral ambiguity that defines Labute’s best work and what makes most of the movie quite watchable. Labute is a master of making his audience follow and even emphasize with characters who commit terrible actions towards other people. He takes what would be cardboard villains in other movies and shades them to make them full and believable human beings (think Aaron Eckhart in In The Company Of Men or any character in Your Friends And Neighbors). Samuel L. Jackson’s aging police officer fits perfectly into this mold. Even though we spend the entire movie watching him psychologically torture an innocent couple, he is the most compelling character on screen and you almost want to root for him…that is until the disastrous cartoon “climax” of course.