Bros hit the road with big gun in `Kin'
Alternately familiar, preposterous and only occasionally intriguing, the chase thriller “Kin” has a low-key science-fiction element that doesn’t really pop until the climax, prompting a re-exami- nation of all that’s come before.
Expanded from a 15-minute short called “Bag Man,” the writing-directing siblings Jonathan and Josh Baker begin, like so many Disney movies, with a motherless youth: Eli (an engaging Myles Truitt), who copes with a harsh terrain.
His righteous adopted dad (Dennis Quaid, very good) is strict and protective. And, it turns out, for good reason. When his just-released-from-prison son Jimmy (Jack Reynor)
arrives home, Dad immediately foresees trouble. Jimmy is burdened with major debt to James Franco’s sociopathic gangster Taylor, protection money for the years behind bars.
There’s no way Jimmy can pay. So when Taylor threatens serious damage to his stepbrother and dad, he has no choice but to go along as this living scum robs Dad’s safe.
It’s a horribly botched, violent job that leaves one man dead and sees Jimmy and Eli speed away to Tahoe.
However, right before all of this takes place, Eli, in his solitary exploration around the neighborhood, discovered what look like several corpses in an abandoned building.
On the floor beside them, he’s picked up a strange, boxy weapon with flashing lights that’s definitely otherworldly.
So when Eli runs away with Jimmy, he brings this thing, which at a crucial moment is revealed to be a wildly powerful assault weapon.
That’s around when the two meet Zoe Kravitz’s pole stripper in a sleazy roadside bar, where the locals are homicidal and only Eli’s handheld fireworks deter them.
“Kin” would be much better if the pacing was faster and there wasn’t this pervasive cluelessness about its characters.
Dad is too similar to an Old Testament fire-andbrimstone prophet to be sympathetic — even though he’s right in everything he loudly proclaims.
Jimmy is hardly a figure worth redeeming: He’s a horrible, self-pitying jerk who is solely responsible for his dad’s safe being robbed and someone dying.
Yet as he takes this road trip, Reynor’s Jimmy might as well be riding off to Disney World — he’s carefree and happy, although Taylor in murderous pursuit promises only more horrors.
Impressionable Eli finds in Kravitz’s working girl a maternal, commonsense guide. Slowly he comes to the realization what “kin” in his life really means.