Film review: ‘Breaking In’

Hostage thriller couldn't kidnap itself out of paper bag...|

It’s one thing that Hollywood can’t make good, big budget pictures anymore and another, even more disappointing thing, that it can’t produce proper B pictures. The film “Breaking In” cost $6 million and one hoped for a perverse thriller or a black-hearted noir but the movie offers nothing at all. It’s tagline-“Payback Is a Mother”-is unearned, but would have at least made for a better title.

The mom doing the paying back is Shaun Russell (Gabrielle Union). She drags her kids, Jasmine (Ajiona Alexus) and Glover (Seth Carr), to Lake Constance, Wisconsin, where her wealthy father had a mansion. After his death, she must settle the estate, which is situated pretty far from the lake and any neighbors.

Upon arrival, Shaun just wants to pound some wine and her kids only wish to interact with technology - Jasmine her phone and Glover a drone. Their stilted family banter ends abruptly when the Russells find a crew of bad dudes in the house searching for millions in cash that the old man had supposedly squirrelled away.

Instead of leaving and coming back at literally any other time to find the hidden safe, the baddies decide to kidnap the kids and leave Shaun to her wits in the woods. The ensuing family hostage film is like Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games,” except that instead of being unbearably tense, it’s unbearably tedious.

Your evil mastermind is Eddie (Billy Burke), whose acumen at selecting henchmen is questionable at best. There’s Duncan (Richard Cabral), a neck-tattooed knife buff with a junior high-school mustache, Sam (Levi Meaden) a blonde-dyed dunce, and Peter (Mark Furze), a character so lightly sketched you forget he exists. They all chose their finest ripped designer jeans for the home invasion/kidnapping and look under couch cushions millions of dollars.

Eddie has the mien of a preschool teacher saddled with disruptive tots and feels compelled to make the occasional philosophic pronouncement: “Moms don’t run while the babies are in the nest.” One senses, from his black beard and mannerisms, that Mr. Burke watched Billy Bob Thornton in films like “One False Move” before performing this role. Sadly, he isn’t as talented as Mr. Thornton and is saddled with a horrific screenplay (written in finger paints by Ryan Engle).

By way of Shaun’s character, the script attempts a sort of gender-swapped Liam Neeson in his “very particular set of skills” oeuvre but Engle’s work here lacks the punch of even mediocrities like “The Commuter” and “Non-Stop.”

Under the dull, dingy direction of James McTeigue, the film tries to be a tense cat-and-mouse thriller but cats and mice are smarter than these characters. There is some tension around whether a real estate agent, a pizza man or the cops might eventually show up, but Shaun must do the rescuing on her own. “Breaking In” needs a cameo from Lil Rel Howery’s TSA agent in “Get Out” so bad it hurts.

Shaun fights against the witless criminals with whatever weapons she can find - from the stem of a broken wineglass to the tires of a pickup truck. She’s so resourceful that Eddie seems to develop a little crush on her. This bizarre angle hardly covers plot holes large enough to drive through - the security system in the house works in different ways for different people at different times and Eddie wields one of those movie guns that never runs out of bullets.

The premise of the film is that the bad guys have only 90 minutes to find the safe, open it, and escape with the booty. Their lack of urgency is maddening, and in direct contrast with the audience’s urgent need for the movie to conclude as quickly as possible.

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