The short might be sweet but Kin strikes a sour note

There’s a long, sometimes august history of shorts being made into science-fiction features.

Terry Gilliam’s 1995 mind bender 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.

And a few years later, director Shane Acker adapted his computer-generated short 9 into a feature of the same name.

It doesn’t always work out, however.

Pixels, a fascinating two-minute short from 2010, in which the world gets turned into an eight-bit version of itself, bombed as the 2015 Adam Sandler film that’s 53 times as long but less than half as much fun.

Kin, which opened across Canada on Aug. 31, appears to be a remake that doesn’t work. It wasn’t screened in advance for Canadian critics, and the few international reviewers who saw 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 finds a weapon of unknown provenance but immense power. He uses it to help his ex-con brother, who’s on the run from a criminal gang.

The brother is played by Jack Reynor, who looks like Chris Pratt, but probably comes a lot cheaper. It’s surprising to find A-lister James Franco slumming it as the crime lord.

The cast also includes Zoë Kravitz as a stripper with a heart of Adamantium.

Word on the street is that Kin has 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.”