Run through the house. Run out of the house. Run back into the house.
Watching Breaking In, the new home invasion thriller, is exhausting to the point you feel like you’re enduring Chariots of Tired.
Even the actors seem weary, especially poor criminal mastermind Billy Burke, who resembles a slightly grittier Derek Hough from World of Dance, which means he ain’t scary in the slightest.
This is the worst kind of genre cinema — derivative, bone-headed and boring.
It’s shocking that director James McTeigue’s career has devolved to this, but truth be told, he hasn’t made a watchable movie since 2009’s Ninja Assassin, and it’s now clear that V for Vendetta was a fluke.
The film starts off somewhat promising with an intro that ends with a guy getting mowed down by an SUV while out jogging (Question — for how many years now have directors relied on this now-stale trope of having a vehicle suddenly appear to smash POV-style into the screen?)
Apparently, the guy is a notorious criminal with a sprawling multi-acre estate in Wisconsin (um, OK) populated by horse barns and a giant, fully-automated fortress of a house that features state-of-the-art security technology. And, apparently, he also has a secret safe inside the house with, like, $40 million in cash stashed away.
Gabrielle Union plays the guy’s daughter, Shaun Russell. You never learn what she does for work. All that matters is she’s a mother to two children, teenager Jasmine (lone standout Ajiona Alexus) and her kid brother Glover (Seth Carr).
Shaun and her father haven’t spoken in years, but she still packs up her kids and hits the road to his estate to sign some documents to sell the property after he dies.
So far, ho-hum.
Once they arrive, McTeigue goes to great lengths to show off all the whiz-bang features of the fortified mansion, from surveillance cameras in every room to unbreakable glass in every window. One might assume such high-tech gadgets will play a pivotal role later on; one would be mistaken.
Within minutes, it’s clear that Shaun and her kids aren’t alone inside the mansion. As soon as she walks outside to make a phone call, all the doors lock tight and Shaun helplessly watches as bad guy Eddie (Burke) waves while a protective film descends on the windows.
Eddie wants to find the safe and steal the cash. He’s disabled the security system (only it still works — one of the many glaring WTF plot holes), but he’s got just 90 minutes before the cops arrive to investigate. Thankfully, the film is just 88 minutes long.
It’s up to Shaun to break in (get it?) and save her kids because that’s what super-moms do.
Here’s the thing — this is a well-trodden formula. It’s nothing more than an excuse to have an actor explore playing in the action-thriller sandbox by giving them a backstory replete with former military or law enforcement training so that once the bad guys gain the upper hand, their character can start kicking ass and snapping necks to everyone’s surprise.
That is not Breaking In.
Hell, this isn’t even Kidnap where Halle Berry kicked and clawed her way through a nest of evil hillbillies to save her son and rescue other kidnapped children.
Shaun has no special skills. She gets lucky fighting with some of the schlubs, but she is not a badass. She’s simply a mom.
Or, as Burke’s Eddie keeps saying, she’s just a woman, alone, facing four strangers, and she has no chance in hell of coming out on top. Occasionally, he switches it up to call her “an impressive woman,” always keeping the focus on her gender.
Is this really the kind of inspirational message Hollywood wants to send post-#MeToo? Apparently so, as the script from Ryan Engle is rife with homophobic and misogynistic put-downs.
Eddie’s taunts might mean something if he and his merry band — which includes Duncan (Richard Cabral), the Hispanic psychopath; Sam (Levi Meaden), the tweaker who gets harassed for having gay prison sex; and Peter (Mark Furze), so disposable he’s truly just missing a red Star Trek shirt — weren’t at the top of the list of most inept criminals in history.
Seriously, these schmucks make Marv and Harry from Home Alone seem like Hans Gruber.
In 2002, David Fincher showed how to make a taunt, white-knuckle home invasion thrill-ride with Panic Room that essentially featured Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart stuck in a room.
But 16 years later, the best that McTeigue can muster is to have Shaun and her kids run around in circles doing the exact opposite of what they’re told. "Go now, run as fast as you can," Shaun implores. The kids get 10 sprints away from the house, only to turn and go back. Run, hide, repeat.
Despite being invested early on, even the preview audience turned on Breaking In after the third or fourth time Shaun refused to act logically, and well before her big "You broke into the wrong fucking house" proclamation.
Based on the film's tag line (Payback is a Mother), and marketing push, Universal Pictures really wants America to celebrate Mother’s Day by going to see Breaking In. Which is why we're publishing this after Mother's Day, because here's a pro tip: If you care for your mom in the slightest, don’t take the bait or you may find yourself desperately trying to — ahem — break out of the theater long before the credits roll.
John W. Allman has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist and writer, but he’s loved movies his entire life. Good movies, awful movies, movies that are so gloriously bad you can’t help but champion them. Since 2009, he has cultivated a review column and now a website dedicated to the genre films that often get overlooked and interviews with cult cinema favorites like George A. Romero, Bruce Campbell and Dee Wallace. Contact him at Blood Violence and Babes.com, on Facebook @BloodViolenceBabes or on Twitter @BVB_reviews.
This article appears in May 10-17, 2018.