Shorts don’t always equal sweet

There’s a long, sometimes august history of shorts being made into science-fiction features. Terry Gilliam’s 1995 mindbender 12 Monkeys was inspired by French filmmaker Chris Marker’s 1962 experimental short La Jetée.

District 9, the 2006 debut of South Africa’s Neill Blomkamp, was expanded from Blomkamp’s own short Alive in Joburg. It doesn’t always work out so well, however. Exhibit A: Pixels, a fascinating two-minute short from 2010, in which the world gets turned into an eight-bit version of itself; and Pixels, a 2015 Adam Sandler film that’s 53 times as long, but less than half the fun.

Kin looks like it might be the latter type of remake. It was not screened in advance for Canadian critics, and the few international reviewers who managed to see it have it pegged at 18 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes.

The movie was written and directed by brothers Josh and Jonathan Baker, and is based on their 2014 short Bag Man, which you can watch online.

The feature version stars Myles Truitt as Eli Solinksi, who while rummaging through an abandoned building finds a weapon of unknown provenance but immense power. He uses it to help his ex-con brother (that explains the Kin title), who’s on the run from a criminal gang.

The brother is played by Jack Reynor, who looks incredibly like Chris Pratt, but probably comes a lot cheaper.

It’s surprising, therefore, to find the A-list James Franco slumming it as the crime lord; I’d have expected his B-list brother Dave (or even C-lister Tom) in the role.

Also in the cast is Zoë Kravitz as a stripper with a heart of Adamantium; from X-Men to Divergent, Mad Max and After Earth, there doesn’t seem to be a sci-fi movie she’ll turn down.

Word on the street is that Kin has two vibes. There’s an ’80s Stranger Things feel, not surprising considering that producers Shawn Levy and Dan Cohen worked on both projects; and there’s a twist at the end that screams “sequel.”

So if Kin does better with audiences than critics, expect cinematic siblings to follow.