Director: Joel Schumacher
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Nicole Kidman, Cam Gigandet, Ben Mendelsohn, Dash Mihok, Liana Liberato, Jordana Spiro
Certificate: 15
Running Time: 91 Minutes
Synopsis: As they’re held for ransom, a husband and wife’s predicament grows more dire amid the discovery of betrayal and deception.
Director Joel Schumacher has been on a hiding to nothing since the disaster that was BATMAN AND ROBIN. The only person to really come out of that failure unscathed was George Clooney (and he was the one wearing those bat nipples!). The likes of Alicia Silverstone, Chris O’Donnell and Arnold Schwarzenegger saw their careers never recover back to the heights they once were, along with the director’s. Nicolas Cage too, has struggled in a rollercoaster of a career in recent years. The LEAVING LAS VEGAS Oscar-winner had huge success with thrilling and enjoyable fair like CON AIR, THE ROCK and FACE/OFF. That now appears to be a distant memory – you immediately think of SEASON OF THE WITCH, GHOST RIDER and the dreadful WICKER MAN remake. So what do we get when we pair Schumacher and Cage with Nicole Kidman for home-invasion thriller TRESPASS?
Cage plays Kyle Miller, a middle man who makes a luxurious living setting various deals up between willing sets of parties, whether it’s a deal involving a property or even diamonds, Kyle makes sure he gets his piece of the pie. Kidman is his wife Sarah, an architect who is just putting the finishing touches to their newly acquired hi-tech home. Their daughter Avery is the usual teenage girl, interested in partying with her friends, although she comes with a lot more brains than the typecast girls in most movie plots.
It immediately becomes apparent that something is amiss between the couple, a tension and a distance even when they show affection to one another. When a call from what they think is the police comes from their secure gates, their naivety lets a gang of armed invaders into their home, a situation that slowly unfolds into nightmare for the family. The presence of these violent unpredictable criminals soon begins driving a wedge between Kyle and Sarah with each having secrets revealed that the gang has managed to acquire.
The film is definitely not the disaster many may have expected; in fact Cage is pretty good as the husband and father, giving a lot more depth to his character than those over-the-top roles of late, this time playing it very low-key. Kidman too is decent, portraying Sarah as a wife who is not afraid to use her gorgeous body and stunning looks to distract her captors to gain an advance in various parts of the film. The film has a few neat twists and turns as well as some clever red herrings that create a genuine thrilling experience but is often let down by a number of flashback scenes. These come across as corny CSI style sequences, and treating the audience as not smart enough to piece together important plot points. Some are obviously needed in order to move the story along, explaining the criminals background and exactly why they were the ones chosen, but shot as a dreamlike scene takes away its impact. Ben Mendelsohn, who gave a unforgettable and chilling performance in ANIMAL KINGDOM, this time amps up his psycho role of lead villain Elias.
On the whole, tighter editing along with another twenty or thirty minutes to flesh out the characters could have raised this movie above similar genre films and made a jump from being good to great. A more satisfying ending should also have been looked at, this one leaves the viewer with the ‘ is that it?’ reaction. Although nowhere near as brutal or edge-of-your-seat thrilling as this years other home-invasion thriller MOTHER’S DAY, TRESPASS is an enjoyable enough film for fans of the genre and of course Nicolas Cage.
TRESPASS is released in cinemas 11th November 2011.
