Breaking In * (2018, Gabrielle Union, Billy Burke, Richard Cabral) – Movie Review

Gabrielle Union stars in director James McTeigue’s strained and implausible thriller Breaking In (2018) as Shaun Russell, who turns up at the great home her father has just left her, along with her two kids Jasmine and Justin (Ajiona Alexus, Jason George), and in no time they are being terrorised by four extremely nasty thugs looking for the old man’s hidden crock of gold.

All Shaun has to is tell they thugs the whereabouts of the cash and they say they will be gone, but, no, instead Shaun decides she has to fight back to protect herself and her family. Well, fair enough, if she just handed over the money there would be no film, or at least a very short one. But, if she is going to fight back, it has to be convincing, and Breaking In struggles at every point to be convincing, and also struggles to keep up its invention and dynamism, even over its short running time of under 90 minutes.

Home invasion thrillers are always welcome, however many times they have been done before. But, especially because of that, they have to be good. Panic Room was good. And Breaking In is very like Panic Room, except without the good.

The film’s bad guys are a ludicrous bunch of knockabout layabouts – Billy Burke, Richard Cabral, Levi Meaden and Mark Furze – acting (badly) like they are in the reboot of Home Alone. Nothing they do or say seems to make any sense or kick up any interest. They are physically formidable, so Gabrielle Union could not survive any of the many hands-on close encounters she has with them, but they are otherwise pathetic as adversaries, making Union’s job combating them uninteresting and with an inevitable conclusion. It does end, but it does not end well, that is not excitingly or thrillingly. Actually, it kind of just fizzles out, and, oh, that’s what’s just happened, okay then, what’s next? Oh, nothing.

Union’s acting is OK, reasonably solid and believeable, as the earnest middle-aged mom, and so, under the circumstances, is Burke’s, getting by by underplaying. But the over-heated performances of Cabral, Meaden and Furze are at best untruthful, at worst borderline risible. Breaking In needs a complete makeover, with more pace, more action, more credibility, more decent dialogue, more back story explanation, and just plain more.

They made it cheap – $6,000,000 – so it’s gonna make a neat profit after taking $17,630,285 on its US opening weekend. Incidentally, though the posters say ‘Payback is a Mother’, which may sell a lot of tickets, it is not a revenge thriller but instead a survival/ home invasion thriller.

Breaking In is directed by James McTeigue, runs 88 minutes, is written by Ryan Engle is made by Breaking In Pictures and Will Packer Productions, and released by Warner Bros.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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