Samuel L. Jackson’s ‘Terrace’ performance undercut by director LaBute’s cop-out plot

Not long into "Lakeview Terrace," I was thinking about Jesse Jackson's open-mike comments about Barack Obama.

It wasn't like I was bored. Far from it. I was engrossed in the movie's central character - a black man (Samuel J. Jackson) who resents the interracial couple next door - and I was trying to account for his resentment.

Which brought me back to Jackson and Obama. There's been tension between the two men, a tension some pundits ascribe to the way the old-guard civil-rights warriors feel about the freedoms they've won - they have battle scars, and they resent how comparatively easy things have come to succeeding generations.

You can sense elements of that conflict in police officer Abel Turner (Jackson), a veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department who's worked double shifts for nearly 30 years to move his family from South Central to a posh hillside neighborhood.

He wants to make sure these gains are not squandered by his children - he insists on the King's English at the dinner table, and wants his kids appropriately dressed.

There's a lot to like about old-school Abel (especially as played by the charismatic Jackson), and so we're curious as to why he instantly dislikes the attractive, pleasant young couple that moves in next door - a white businessman (Patrick Wilson) with a Stanford pedigree and his patrician black wife (Kerry Washington).

Some of Abel's feelings are rooted in class - the young couple has chosen a "starter home" in a neighborhood where Abel is going to finish. Money has come easy to them, and so has the assumption that a colorblind society will approve of their union.

In one of several menacing exchanges between Abel and his new neighbor, the cop cops to his simmering resentment, and hisses that their faith in a racially harmonious world is misplaced.

In another lively scene, Abel crashes their housewarming party - it looks like a United Colors of Benetton commercial - and issues similar proclamations, to the shock of the young, hip party guests.

To this point, "Lakeview Terrace" is pretty diverting, and seems headed in a more interesting direction than, say, a crazed-cop-next-door movie like "Unlawful Entry."

But it isn't. Abel resorts to sabotage, his neighbor retaliates, and things very quickly get out of hand. The movie can't find a way to sort itself out without guns, chain saws, mixed martial arts and a vulnerable woman being stalked by a hulking guy in a ski mask.

A lurid finale and some late-game script weaknesses work to diminish a character that Jackson has worked hard to embellish. They undermine his good work, and feel out of character for director Neil LaBute, who usually delivers a twist or two. The only surprise here is how ordinary the ending really is. *

Produced by Will Smith and James Lassiter, directed by Neil LaBute, written by David Loughery and Howard Korder, music by Mychael Danna and Jeff Danna, distributed by Screen Gems.