This spring's second Rear Window riff (after Disturbia), Civic Duty stars Peter Krause as Terry Allen, an unemployed accountant who comes to believe that his shifty new Middle Eastern neighbour is a terrorist.

It's a canny premise, playing to a host of post-9/11 phobias – not simply the fear of murderous incursion, but also liberal concerns about the psychic collateral damage of the War on Terror. As the film progresses, however, it's clear that the script has cast its lot with the latter issue. Terry's suspicions are revealed to be stoked by the sinister whispers emanating from his television set.

There is an urgent, nuanced movie to be made here about the tangled anxieties suffusing American life on Dubya's watch, but Civic Duty isn't it. It's hard to take a country's pulse with such a heavy hand.

The script's rhythms are familiar from other paranoia-will-destroy-ya films. (Alienated wife? Check. Five o'clock shadow? Check.) Things bog down once Terry takes matters and a loaded gun into his hands. By the time the sad-eyed neighbour is bound to a chair and righteously inventorying America's foreign-policy missteps – terrorism reduced entirely to roosting-chicken banalities – the film has become as twitchy and misguided as its protagonist.