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Plot Summary: A woman fights to protect her family during a home invasion.

Director: James McTeigue

Writer: Ryan Engle

Runtime: 1 hour 28 mins

Main Cast:

• Gabrielle Union as Shaun Russell
• Billy Burke as Eddie
• Richard Cabral as Duncan
• Ajiona Alexus as Jasmine Russell
• Levi Meaden as Sam
• Seth Carr as Glover Russell

Review by: The Superior Spider Sam

To keep it simple and to the point- you do not need to pay to see this movie.

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What I Liked:

Gabrielle Union came to work. She didn’t put in overtime but she didn’t fall asleep at her desk either. Seeing her a regular mom and not the impossible hero was nice, and would have been refreshing if not bogged down by everything else in this movie.

Seth Carr who plays the youngest child Glover will get some shine, because even in his limited screen time, he was the only actor who made me forget that I was watching a movie, probably because he acted naturally as I would expect a child to.

What I Didn’t Like:

Everything that wasn’t mentioned above. Before I begin, I want to note that this is not so much I “Didn’t Like” the movie as it is “I’ve seen this so many times….and done better.” The word to describe this film is derivative. I mean I’ve seen this plot before and you can get just as many thrills every week by watching an episode of Law and Order: SVU (which will be better acted). Okay so Gabrielle Union plays a mom named Shaun Russel who drives up to her father’s home, after he has passed, in order to pack up his belongings and settle his estate. She brings her two kids with her and when they arrive they are somewhat surprised at how much security her father has added to the home with cameras, bullet proof glass and alarms leading Shaun to suspect that maybe her father was more paranoid than she realized.  This is where the intrigue ends. There is nothing –NOTHING- that stands out in this movie. I first noticed how bland this movie was when Shaun makes a call to her husband early on. This scene is so vanilla and badly scripted that a high schooler could have written it in drama club. It’s a conversation that has phrases like “It’s not your fault,” and “But it feels like it’s my fault.” I mean the stuff her husband said on the phone and the manner in which he said it was no better than the stuff you might have seen in a company training video. Not the worst acting I’ve seen, but nothing to write home about. It was a scene that left me thinking “…Okay. Why should I even care?” and “People do not actually talk like that.”

Anyway, the plot picks up when 4 (even though you’ll only remember 3) thieves reveal themselves on the house grounds and lock Shaun outside while keeping the children hostage. They are there looking for money they believe her father had hidden- and that is the movie folks. There are no plot twists, no major character development, nothing to relate to that will draw you in. I mean the thieves- dear lord- the thieves are so un-relatable and SO unbelievable that I have to believe the target audience are actually 13-year-olds who haven’t watched prime time television yet.  There’s a scene when one of them suggests threatening the kids for leverage and another one says “just shut up and do what I freaking said!” Really? “Freaking?”- this was clearly a substitute for the F-word as they use it…a lot. I know it’s PG-13 so they can only use the F-word once (it was a badly acted moment when they did use it by the way), but come on! I’ve felt more threatened by the villain of the week on an episode of NCIS. You don’t need language to convey fear- you need good acting, or a viable threat that makes me fear for the protagonists, and this movie lacked both in spades.

I don’t want to continue bashing this movie because I feel it’s was bad directing and a bad script that made me dislike it. I will say there is absolutely nothing here that you need to rush out to see. Wait for it to come on cable- not even a streaming service cable. I mean, with the amount of “freaking” said in it I felt like I was watching a basic cable dub anyway. Oh and there is “violence” in this movie, but again it’s so bad that you’d see more blood on any police procedural. Even the basic fighting is poorly choreographed, granted they are not supposed to be martial artists, but like with most of this movie I kept screaming in my head “PEOPLE DO NOT ACT LIKE THAT!”

Images Courtesy of IMDB