Testosterone-driven entertainment with a moral, sleekly directed by James Foley.

It's a maddening, satisfying, junky, enjoyable picture.

Forceful and well-acted. Fear truly lives up to its title.

Foley has a fine sense of shading in depicting a slightly dysfunctional family. The problem with this subgenre is the way it has to demonize and dehumanize its villains in order to produce the desired effect, which brutalizes the spectator along with the story and characters. If you can accept this limitation, this is a very efficient piece of machinery.

Fear is pretty much a cheap-thrills fix; the ideas, such as they are, function as window dressing. Still, cheap though these thrills may be, they are genuinely thrilling.