We've seen it all before nicely sums up "Homecoming." Plot, characters, twists and turns (Such as they are) are all strictly out of the stock Hollywood thriller handbook.
The stock plot revolves around small town football star Michael (Matt Long) coming home to see his High School jersey retired with new girlfriend Elizabeth (A very cute Jessica Stroup) in tow ostensibly so she can get to know his old friends and meet his parents. Unfortunately for Mike and especially unfortunate for Elizabeth, Mike's old flame from his high school days, Shelby (Mischa Barton) is still in town and still believes he carries a torch for her as she so obviously does for him. When she discovers her old love has a new lover and is no longer interested in her she's devastated.
Shortly Elizabeth falls into Shelby's clutches and becomes her prisoner as Shelby hatches a plot to make her rival miserable while trying to win back her old boyfriend.
Virtually every cliché in the "desperate to escape" victim playbook is used and most are presented only half-heartedly at best. Eventually all the players come together for the clichéd ending and anyone who's surprised by how it all plays out has never seen a modern Hollywood thriller or has an IQ lower than Forrest Gump himself.
There are plot holes galore and the story requires otherwise intelligent characters to act stupid or at least do stupid things no one in such real life situations ever would. Elizabeth is presented with several obvious methods of escape or at least chances to alert other people to her predicament but passes up the most fundamental means at her disposal simply so the writers can extent her pain and suffering and make the movie last the requisite hour and half viewing time. (One obvious case is when a loan officer comes to visit Shelby at her house and when he leaves a supposedly desperate Elizabeth can only meekly tap at the window to try and gain his attention when she has over a dozen devices around her in the room she could easily use to smash the glass and alert him to her presence.) Certain plot points never add up and simply become distractions as the movie plods along. Although Elizabeth is supposed to be the love of Mike's life he and his policeman cousin Billy (Michael Landes) accept Elizabeth's disappearance fairly casually. At first Mike acts extremely upset at her apparent last minute ditching of him on the eve of her finally meeting his parents, yet never goes beyond a few vain attempts to call her for an explanation. Mike's parents never seem to upset at possibly never meeting the woman that might be their future daughter in-law and no one else in town ever seems to ask Mike about his girlfriend's absence.
Elizabeth discovers evidence Shelby poisoned her mother yet Shelby's motives for doing so are never explained. She seems to have only inherited a tremendous amount of debt from her mother's death as both the business and house she left behind are near foreclosure. At one point while trying to affect an escape, Elizabeth smashes Shelby in the face with a porcelain toilet tank lid only to have Shelby quickly cover up the damage in the next scene with a light touch of make up. No one even asks her about her head injury throughout the rest of the movie! And why a character so obviously demented as Shelby went unnoticed all her life in such a closed, rural small town, especially by her long time boyfriend, is beyond explanation.
The biggest plot hole of all is why Shelby keeps her rival alive at all especially when her homicidal tendencies become evident half-way through the film.
I could go on but you get the idea.
Mischa Barton, for all her off screen real life escapades, is turning in to a very competent actress. She's really the only reason to sit through this thing to the bitter, hackneyed end. She's obviously about 4 points better looking than anyone else in the film and another plot hole is why anyone so attractive would have such a hard time finding a decent replacement for an old high school boyfriend in the first place.
If you really want to see a good, tightly scripted thriller about an innocent victim held prisoner by a psychopath rent the much better "Misery." You'll get Kathy Bates instead of the fetching Mischa Barton but you won't regret the time you spent watching it either.
