“What do you want from us?” “I don’t know. Why don’t we start with everything you got.” That’s Kyle Miller (Nicolas Cage), a fast-talking businessman, asking the leader of three intruders who’ve just taken over his private estate and are holding him and his wife, Sarah (Nicole Kidman), hostage in the thriller Trespass.
Elias (Ben Mendelsohn), the leader of the criminals, has been planning the home invasion for some time now and seems to know almost everything about the Millers except that their rebellious teenage daughter has slipped out to go to a party that her parents said no to. Loud, violent, and desperate, Elias and his crew threaten and beat Kyle to try to convince him to open his unbreakable wall safe.
Convinced that if he gives into the thugs’ demands, he and Sarah will be murdered, Kyle begins a series of negotiations and mind games with Elias trying to buy time and find a way to get the upper hand on his captors and save his family.
Trespass is a chaotic, dramatic thriller that’s a loud, noisy, preposterous mess of a film. It’s horribly written with some of the most ridiculous dialogue to hit the big screen in the last few years. The audience at the press screening was laughing out loud at the unbelievably silly and moronic lines being shouted by the actors. Joel Schumacher’s direction has reached a new low point in his career with this film, never knowing when to cut a scene, and becoming repetitious with the same crude, vulgar, and sadistic torture of the family.
Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman give what just might be considered the worst performances of their careers in this sham of a thriller. When Cage isn’t screaming his lines and overacting all over the screen, he seems bored and uninterested in anything going on around him, much like the audience will be. Kidman, playing a bored, desperate, wealthy housewife who longs to be desired by her husband, once again seems stiff and uncomfortable in the early scenes with Cage. Not once are they believable as a married couple. Later in the film, Kidman makes a solid effort to seem truly terrified by the intruders, but it’s too little too late.
Pointless and uninspired, Trespass is a horrible film that makes the movie-going experience painful and is a perfect example of why some movie theaters give refunds to audience members who leave before the film is half over. Please save yourself some time and money and don’t bother going into the theater to see it to begin with.
GRADE: F
Trespass was directed by Joel Schumacher and is rated R for violence and terror, pervasive language and some brief drug use.
