Remember Geostorm? Unless you’re an obsessive like myself
who writes about nearly every new movie they watch, probably not. Well, get
ready for the whiplash because this is what director Dean Devlin made after
that infamous attempt to beat Roland Emmerich at his own game. And the result
could not be more different from his previous. He’s gone from world-spanning
disaster spectacle to an thriller with elements of home invasion cinema that
has more in common with the works of Thomas Harris than anything to do with
making us fear man-made climate change.
This in and of itself is nothing new in the film world, as
directors often go for something smaller after a relatively large undertaking
to pace themselves. However, not only is this stylistically different from
Devlin’s past filmography, it’s also a major entertainment switch-up as well.
As in I don’t need to lean on ‘it’s so bad it’s good’ rhetoric to vouch for
this thing; it is genuinely good.
The plot itself is rather bare-bones, following somewhat in
the footsteps of Don’t Breathe in its ‘you broke into the wrong house’ impetus
and leading into a more traditional procedural element, and it’s something that
requires solid actors to make lively. Something this film has in
abundance. Playing the part of yet another murderous bastard with a penchant
for gaslighting, David Tennant is brilliant as the villain here. The accent
takes a bit to get used to (or maybe that’s just because I know him more for
his tenure on Doctor Who than Jessica Jones), but for cold and calculating
menace, his dressage-obsessed trust fund kid is gripping in all the right ways
for a story like this.
Opposite him is Robert Sheehan of Misfits fame, and while
it’s nice seeing that he is holding onto his native accent for this,
it’s just straight-up mesmerising seeing him breeze through the character he’s
given. A home burglar who, after a single shocking encounter, reconsiders his
life and his own moral compass, isn’t something that any actor can pull off.
But seeing Sheehan give his all to the role, never relenting on the emotional
energy or his insistence on saving the woman he found in that house,
really drives home the dramatic irony of his place in the story; the man who
did the right thing for once in his life, and nearly lost everything in the
process. Oh, and Kerry Condon is amazing too, giving some of the best lines in
a film surprisingly well-stocked with them.
Not that all of this is entirely out of character for
Dean Devlin, though. It still carries that bizarre comedic vein that gave us
the gloriousness of Andy Garcia declaring that he’s the goddamn President of
the United States of America, only it’s much better metered out here. The
initial scenes with Sheehan’s Sean and his literal partner-in-crime in Carlito
Olivero’s Derek make for decent banter, along with an amusing scene of a dog
chasing Derek around while ‘on the job’. But when shit gets real, that fades
away into proper nail-baiting that the genre is built on, so it doesn’t get too
carried away with the jokes.
Nor does it get carried away with the effects work, which is
mostly good here. When people get beaten the fuck up or shot or tied up in
chairs, it looks legit… but that’s because the practical effects are on-point.
The CGI, though? Well, it’s thankfully far lesser here than before, but even in
the brief moments it shows up, it looks off. From the opening scene of a
younger Cale flogging a horse to death, which looks like the gritty reboot of
Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron that no-one asked for, to the one explosion
we get, it manages to be jarring even though we only get brief seconds of them
on-screen.
But that’s a very minor niggle in a film that otherwise is
very thrilling. The acting is solid, the pacing is good and tight, the
cinematography and soundtrack add a lot to the tone (especially a brilliant
scene revealing where the killer’s victims have been buried), and it even has a
bit of class commentary with the dirt-poor thief going up against the
upper-class and tech-savvy villain. Not quite as good a blend of home invasion
and class satire as, say, Parasite, but it adds enough spice to keep this from
being entirely generic. And even when taken as a generic thriller, its ability
at engagement alone makes it worth checking out.
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