Trespass is what
is known as a bad movie, plain and simple. It’s phony to its core. The movie
comes from director Joel Schumacher who has made some good movies and some bad
ones over the course of his career. This is definitely a bad one. It’s a home
invasion thriller that’s only the slightest mood shift away from being a
flat-out comedy. It’s a film of stupid criminals and lousy hostages that keeps
inventing new reasons to keep the characters in the same place well past any
kind of logic, internal or otherwise.
The movie starts when the rich man (Nicolas Cage) comes home
to his wife (Nicole Kidman) and daughter (Liana Liberato). We know he’s rich
because we hear the sound of Cage rapidly negotiating the price of a diamond
accompanying the opening aerial shot that tracks his convertible down a long
winding road leading to their beachfront steel-and-glass mansion that’s tucked
away in the forest. Once there, he continues to negotiate while he tries to
help his wife make sure their willful teenage daughter doesn’t get to the local
bad girl’s house for a party.
The girl huffs upstairs and the husband and wife prepare for
their evening, which is soon interrupted by a home invasion. A group of thieves
barges in and waves around their guns while barking for security codes. It
turns out they know about the diamonds and would really like them. There’s the
conflict. It’s a good thing that the daughter snuck out of the house and sped
away in a friends car just a scene or two earlier.
What follows is filled with yelling, whining, cajoling,
pleading, and frustrated barking from all of the characters all of the time.
It’s monotonous. As the head of the gang, Ben Mendelsohn stalks about while his
gang members wander around looking mean, constantly waving around guns that
make clickety-clack noises at the slightest touch. These crooks are so obvious
that you can size them up in a second, like the henchman played by Cam Gigandet
who will pretty clearly end up being the criminal with second thoughts since he
gets so shifty eyed in his every reaction shot. Collectively the gang seems to
be pretty dumb. They keep changing their demands and producing different
threatening objects. It’s like they want
to hang around this house for some time.
Have they even thought this plan through? Sure, they have
electrical tape around their fingertips, but their masks are so porous I was
identifying the actors underneath them almost immediately. And all Cage has to
do is start poking holes in their scheme and the characters get to sit around
and threaten each other all night. At one point the daughter sneaks back into
the house and walks straight into the danger. Why? If she were smart enough to
call for help the movie would be over.
Karl Gajdusek’s script does everything it can to keep the
movie rolling forward beyond all plausibility. The homeowners are able to take
their captors off task with such skill that I found myself hoping for some
ultimate ludicrous twist that never materializes despite the ever-growing pile
of ludicrous twists and diversions. This is the kind of movie in which the
intelligence of any given character at any given time is dependent solely on
what the plot requires at that point. These aren’t characters. These are barely
caricatures. It’s all one big phony construct. This is barely a film. It’s a
feature-length stalling tactic that keeps the characters, and the audience,
locked up in this house well past any reason they should be.
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