DOMESTIC DISTURBANCE     - A Narada Film Review
   
Stills:DOMESTIC DISTURBANCE, Director: Harold Becker, Produced by J.D. Crane / D. De Line

   DOMESTIC DISTURBANCE is cast well and performances are good all the way around, with John Travolta as 'Frank Morrison' (the straight-up dad), and Vince Vaughan as 'Rick Barnes' (the husband-to-be).   Teri Polo is 'Susan' (the attractive wife, and mother of) Matt O'Leary as 'Danny'.
          That's the end of the good news.   DOMESTIC DISTURBANCE is a narcosis-inducing suspense-thriller with a cookie-cutter suspense plot - down to, and inlcuding the hackneyed old scene where the baddie cuts the telephone line. - this scene has been used so many times I thought I was watching it in black and white.   It even had the lame old 'thriller' stand-by filler scene: - the locking of the glass door that any child could break through.  And here's the kicker - it also had a cookie-cutter family values sub-plot, where the husband and wife are recently divorced and the twelve year-old son   -you guessed it-   is having trouble coping with it all.
       Scripting was at the hands of Lewis Colick, William S. Comanor and Gary Drucker - Three, where one would have sufficed; they obviously decided by committee on which scenes to re-use .   The icing on the cake was the tediously predictable ending.   Why did Travolta make this?   Is he on a quota with the studio?   Travolta's getting fat again - so I suspect he was in between movies when he made this.   I'm sure he will go on a diet before filming starts on his next real movie.   Travolta's got nothing to be ashamed of here, but Hollywood does.   This one barely makes the cut; go see it if you are a Travolta fan, or if it looks like the rain isn't going to let up for a while.
       LEAST enduring Line Or Phrase:   "Dad !! You don't believe me either ?"

  Reviewed by Narada for Bangkok Eyes - 15 February 2002

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