RATING: 1/5
Home invasion thriller is nothing new at all, but I always admire the sense of claustrophobia and nervous tension often associated in this kind of genre. Case in point: THE DESPERATE HOURS (1955) to PANIC ROOM (2002). But in Joel Schumacher's latest thriller called TRESPASS, it's more of a convoluted mess than anything else matters. How messy are they? Let's just say, not even a caliber of A-list talents by the likes of Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman can save this train wreck of a movie.
Nicolas Cage plays Kyle, a wealthy and fast-talking diamond broker whose life is slowly falling apart. He has a rocky relationship with his trophy wife Sarah (Nicole Kidman), and both of them are sick of dealing with their rebellious teenage daughter Avery (Lian Liberato). If that's not worst enough, a couple of "police officers" manage to get into their house unsuspected before they revealed themselves as robbers. They are Elias (Ben Mendelsohn), his dopey brother Jonah (Cam Gigandet), bitchy stripper Petal (Jordana Spiro) and muscleman Ty (Dash Mihok). Apparently they want the diamonds they know stored inside Kyle's massive wall safe. Despite being held at gunpoint, Kyle refuses to open the safe whatsoever. That's not all -- it turns out that one of the robbers happen to be the one who install the family's state-of-the-art security system. Not surprisingly, that particular robber has an insider knowledge to execute a home-invasion plan. But there lies another problem -- the same robber is madly in love with Sarah, which complicates the matter further.
At the first glance, Karl Gajdusek's first feature-length screenplay (his previous work was a TV series called Dead Like Me) is ambitious. Somewhere within all the cliched-ridden point that we often seen in a home invasion thriller is the subsequent twists that goes into different direction. Each of the characters have their own hidden agenda, and every twist are revealed in the way where nothing is what it seems at the first place. It's really a good thing, but Gaidusek's script is wildly preposterous. It doesn't help either when most of the dialogues are either watching them screaming at each other or swearing way a lot. But the biggest problem here is how stubborn the story is when comes to development. Throwing a few twists can be exciting to watch for, provided if things are done right. But in TRESPASS, that's hardly the case. All those "twists" often stalls the momentum and it's no surprise we are mostly watching these people doing things in repetitive manner.
It's a shame that the cast are going through the blind motion, with clueless acting performances from Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman. All those actors, who plays the villains, are nothing more than stereotypical trash-talkers. As for Joel Schumacher, his direction is all showy but lacking all those entertaining aura he used to display well during his heydays in the '80s and the '90s. Then again, the now 72-year-old Schumacher's directing career has been an ongoing slump ever since he botched the BATMAN franchise big time back in the mid 1990s and hardly recovered ever since.
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