The Roommate Review

The Roommate stars a list of characters the CW hired at one point or another to add sexual appeal to an otherwise mediocre roster of shows. Minka Kelly (Friday Night Lights, TV Show) which was actually part of the NBC roster at one point, Leighton Meester (Gossip Girl), Alyson Michalka (Hellcats), Danneel Harris (One Tree Hill), Katerina Graham (The Vampire Diaries), Nina Dobrev (The Vampire Diaries), Matt Lanter (90210, The New One), and Cam Gigandet (Twilight, The O.C.) which was part of the FOX roster.

Story and plot aside the marketing campaign that surrounded The Roommate clearly wanted everyone who watches the CW to come out and see this film filling the cast with practically all of its stars. I could clearly see why that would be a smart thing to do. All of those shows listed above are all successful in the 18-49 demographic of people who actually tune in to watch those shows. Most of those people are teenage girls or women in general so with that in mind the movie studio filled the cast with eye candy for the guys as an incentive to actually fake enthusiasm knowing they are going to be forced to go see it either way. So it's a win, win if you ask me.

Now as for the movie itself, the story follows a college freshman who moves into a dorm room and eventually meets her roommate who turns out to be batshit crazy! Simple yes I know but you can't make a plot that direct anymore interesting than it has to be. Don't get me wrong the chick was crazy but not to the extent in which the trailer made you believe she was. She lacked that killer instinct that the trailer force fed you into believing was there. Every time her roommate seemed to show interest in someone else or every time she didn't pay enough attention to her she went over the edge but just looked liked a person who was about to take her own life, not someone else's.

Sometimes these suspense thrillers as this was meant to be, hold back on actually taking the next step and making the movie scary for reasons unknown. The lead up to something actually happening is what they are going for more than the actual kill or scare. I for one would rather be scared than to have the anticipation of being scared be such a let down once you realize it was all just tease at the end of the day.

To be overly critical of a film like this wouldn't be fair because to be honest with you I didn't expect much anyway. I, like most guys who ended up seeing this film saw hot girls on the screen, a brief but satisfying girl on girl make out session and that pretty much summed up what you enjoyed about the film. Towards the end of the film things did get a little interesting and made the suspense/thriller genre label actually live up to it's name for 10 minutes but overall The Roommate isn't anything to write home about. Isn't one of those "must haves" that you'll end up adding to your DVD collection. It's just a regular film, not a bad film but just ordinary. Sometimes and in this case ordinary did just fine.

3 out of 5 stars