BREAKING IN BREAKS NO NEW GROUND
BREAKING IN
★★ out of 5
Cast: Gabrielle Union, Billy Burke, Richard Cabral
Director: James McTeigue
Duration: 1h 28m
In James McTeigue’s Breaking In, scene-stealing Gabrielle Union stars as Shaun, a mother who has a complicated relationship with her recently deceased father. She and her two kids — Glover (Seth Carr), and Jasmine (Ajiona Alexus) — visit her stately childhood home before it’s sold, only to find themselves squaring off against criminals set to steal her father’s safe, which contains $4 million.
Pack leader Eddie (Billy Burke) insults Shaun by referring to her as an “impressive woman,” in one of those boring conventional confronting-the-bad-guy scenes where a conniving felon like Eddie gets to ooze condescension before Shaun turns the tables on him — and in the case of this film, for the umpteenth time.
Breaking In has one too many scenes where Shaun outsmarts the criminals, yet it still takes 88 minutes for her to successfully free her children from her father’s mansion, a high-techsecurity fortress that doesn’t give her any means of, well, breaking in.
She does everything she can to scare and distract the criminals while trying to find a way in and it’s too easy to cheer her on while the foursome proves their ineptitude time and time again.
Shaun’s first encounter with the bad guys, in the nearby woods, is with the supposed brains of the operation, who conveniently is the only one who can open the safe. Once she’s tackled and shackled him, it’s only a matter of time before she takes down the other kidnappingteam archetypes: the younger, impressionable, dopey Sam (Levi Meaden), who may have a change of heart because of the children, and the ruthless, knife-wielding Duncan (Richard Cabral), whose sadistic streak is outweighed only by his inability to think ahead (he’s responsible for most of the senseless, gratuitous violence in the film).
These guys are either brutal or stupid and nothing in between. The audience I watched with laughed uproariously on multiple occasions because the men prove they’re idiots, incapable of hostage-holding, let alone their original purpose in breaking-in: to find money.
While Ryan Engle’s script gives Shaun’s character plenty of opportunities to outwit these dangerous men, there are no accumulative stakes established throughout the film, just piecemeal scares that frustrate her numerous near-successful attempts to free the kids and leave. She smashes a getaway car into a tree, her unwitting husband returns and becomes a new victim just when they’re all-clear — these are all cheap ploys to pump up suspense with little interest in using such stakes to build this dramatic thriller into something more interesting.
It’s fascinating to see the disconnect between how the creators assume the criminal characters will be received — they’re evil, yes, but also no match for Shaun — and how the audience actually does receive them. At some point, their villainy is overtaken by their idiocy, and that’s when audiences typically check out of an alleged thriller that needs to establish a consistent sense of urgency if we’re to take the story seriously.
But when characters spit out lines like “There’s the American dream!” when the criminals finally crack open the safe and marvel at all the money, how can anyone take this film seriously?