Panic Room. By Dennis Harvey

THE COMMERCIAL FAILURE of the dazzling Fight Club must have been a rude shock indeed to director David Fincher, whose thinking-man's balls-afire cinema is founded on nothing if not supreme self-confidence. Maybe the movie was a bit of a philosophical bluff, with ideas that got both more garbled and simplistic the more you thought about them – but it was still light years beyond any testosterone epic you could name, engaging gray matter as well as denting the outer crash helmet. Fincher suddenly seemed as brilliant as he was supposed to be.

How could Fight Club have tanked? Did the public really think it was just about guys pummeling one another for yuks, a knucklehead line-crossing à la Stallone's arm-wrestling campfest Over the Top? Or conversely, were they scared by its not-dumb-enoughness? At the packed screening I saw, people walked out muttering, "That movie was weird," clearly unsure if it was some joke directed at their own tastes and expectations. It made them uneasy. That $63 million, Brad Pitt-indemnified surprise nonhit placed Fincher in the position that would have been James Cameron's if Titanic had sunk like everyone expected: as a "difficult" commercial auteur whose penchant for very expensive packages might not be excused by box-office instinct after all.

Three quiet years later, maybe it's no surprise that his latest emerges smacking a little of calculated wound-licking, grudging acquiescence to an apparently stupid mass audience's low capacity for challenge. Panic Room is a techno-thriller in the simplest sense, i.e., it pivots around a very rich man's up-to-the-moment lifestyle toy as the key plot gimmick. The vast Upper West Side town house that recent divorcée Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) and her daughter, Sarah (Kristen Stewart), move into comes equipped with a secret chamber/fortress. It provides three-inch steel walls, a bank of video surveillance monitors, and other amenities, should unwelcome intruders arrive. Paranoia may come cheap, but indulging it properly, like so many things, takes major cash.

Wouldn't you just know that on the Altmans' very first night in the town house, three variously malevolent burglars, reasonable Burnham (Forest Whitaker), tantrum-prone Junior (Jared Leto), and ski-masked Antichrist Raoul (Dwight Yoakam), break in. Panicked, mom and daughter bunker down. Unfortunately, the unwelcome guests know about the room. Worse still, what they're after (some millions hidden by an eccentric prior resident) is located guess where.

A nightlong standoff ensues, complete with deadly criminal bickering, bluffs, power reversals, additional unexpected visitors, health crises, and so forth. David Koepp's screenplay ups the ante on the claustrophobic pressure-cooker conceit of Desperate Hours, Lady in a Cage, Wait until Dark, and other seminal trapped-by-goons thrillers for a new generation's even shorter attention span – not without creating a few gaping logic loopholes here and there, of course.

Jodie Foster, cast as a last-minute replacement for Nicole Kidman (who got a knee injury three weeks into shooting – why does every dramatic incident in her life smell like a publicist's brainstorm?), hasn't been this well deployed since Silence of the Lambs 11 years ago. The intervening movies too often found her looking wan and tense, as if an entire lifetime of grindstone careerism (starting at age 2) had suddenly induced a functioning nervous breakdown. But that period seems to be over; she looks terrifically hale here and, allowing for the role's nonstop anxiety, more comfortable than she has in aeons. If this classic woman-in-jeopardy part is hardly a challenge, it at least provides her with ample room to demonstrate that she's still a real star, the kind it's really OK to like. The other actors do their this-ain't-Shakespeare duties professionally; the one interesting factor is Stewart, who is just about the perfect little Jodie Jr. both physically and in wary intelligence.

Ever so impressively designed and shot, Panic Room gives a good ride for 108 minutes. Still, there's a popcorn triviality to this material that Fincher can't overcome, and the ways in which he tries are ultimately the wrong ones. Instead of heightening emotional engagement via stillness and pin-drop tension, the movie largely drowns a minimalist concept in maximalist hyperbole: Howard Shore's conventional score seldom shuts up, the camera never stops turbo-tracking, the gratuitous digital effects never stop digitizing. Why submit to the rules of matter or bow to the integrity of walls and floors if FX can make it appear that we pan right through them? Why track around a kitchen appliance when the miracle of CGI allows our POV to lunge through a coffeemaker handle? Why not? Because these are this year's moviemakers' stupid pet tricks, that's why.

The constant reminders of contrivance, plotwise and stylistic, soon make Panic less fraught with anxiety than packed with the usual vicariously amusing, excessive, never-serious Hollywood thrills. Of course you could still do a lot worse – Fincher is a gifted populist filmmaker amid so many hacks. But this one suffers from its budget bloat. Lurking somewhere inside its too many millions of dollars' worth of fun-house twitters is a classic B movie floating away inside a hot air balloon.