The lights go out in the city in the middle of the night. Matthew (Kyle MacLachlan) and Annie Kay (Elisabeth Shue) are a suburban couple with a sick baby. Matthew is somewhat of a door mat. He struggles to get medicine for his sick baby. Their irreverent friend Joe (Dermot Mulroney) arrives. The guys buy a rifle to protect against looting. Annie throws it into the pool. That night, they chase a prowler out into the street where a neighbor shoots him. They decide to leave their cul-de-sac and drive to Annie's parents. On the road, they face their own darkness.

From the moment it starts with the loud-mouthed black people in the movie theater, this movie keeps pushing buttons. It's annoyance at its height. It has the gun issue when anti-gun still has a constituent. Society falls apart so quickly for no reason that the movie feels completely fake. The paranoia and selfishness is dialed all the way to 11 right from the start. They leave their home for a relatively flimsy reason. The movie does find a good place to end but it's a long bumpy unrealistic road.

How tenuous is man's hold on civilization when survival becomes an issue? When the lights go out and stay out for several days, suburbanites Matthew and Annie learn the hard way that man is "by nature" a predatory creature.

Before "Stir of Echoes", David Koepp made "The Trigger Effect". Apparently critics liked it, but the film bombed, and is not sitting very high on IMDb. Respectfully, I disagree with the critics. The film was just so blunt. People are rude to each other. I get that. There was such potential in this film but it seems to have just gone the easiest route.

Most disappointing is the use of the cast. Kyle MacLachlan is amazing, and he is wasted in this film. I wasn't aware he could play a jerk, but now I know. Michael Rooker is also one of my favorites. And yet, neither one seems to be able to save this mess. I thought great actors could save just about anything, but I would be wrong.

As many people have said, "The Trigger Effect" is one of those movies that has a good concept, but isn't executed very well. The truth is, it actually gets kind of creepy. I know, if there was a massive power outage, maybe this could happen, but that doesn't make the movie any more interesting. If we're just going to obsess on the idea that everyone wants to kill each other, we're not doing very much for our society (remember what Michael Moore showed in "Bowling for Columbine"). I mean really.

So, there are much better movies than this (including the "Twilight Zone" episode that this movie ripped off). Kyle MacLachlan, Elisabeth Shue, Dermot Mulroney and Michael Rooker should be at least mildly ashamed of themselves.