“I spent the last twelve years of my life building rooms like this, specifically to keep out people like us.”
David Fincher seems to alternate outright masterpieces (Se7en, Fight Club) with seriously flawed clunkers (The Game) and this would-be claustrophobic thriller which fizzles out by making its trio of villains so bumbling, and the Forest Whitaker character so obviously soft, that there’s never any sense of real danger.
The brownstone where Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) and daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart) hole up in the eponymous strong room is 38 West 94th Street on New York’s Upper West Side.
The interiors were shot in Manhattan, too – Manhattan Beach, Los Angeles, that is, where production designer Arthur Max built the giant set within the studio.
