Film Review | Trespass

This home-invasion thriller holds a quirky record in cinema history.

You shouldn't be too surprised, however, that Joel Schumacher's Trespass barely registered on anybody's radar after its release, because the record in question is, in fact, a dubious honour.

Premiering at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2010, the $35 million-budgeted, Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman-starring film ended up scraping in a measly $25,000. It was then pulled from cinemas and went straight to DVD after just 10 days... beating 2003's rom-com From Justin to Kelly (which in turn was relegated to rental after spending just under a month at the multiplexes).

More often than not, you will see me championing underdog films. I'll even excuse ambitious failures, provided that their faults are interesting, and that they at least provide some quirky respite from the typical fare we get to watch each week.

But in this case I can't help but feel that poetic justice was served. Most of its problems boil down to a ludicrous script that only gets worse as the (seemingly never-ending) running time ticks by.

Cage is go-getting businessman and diamond dealer Kyle Miller, who at the face of it seems to have it all: a gorgeous home in the middle of the woods, an equally attractive wife, Sarah (Kidman) and a typically angst-ridden teenage daughter Avery (Liana Liberato) who appears to have nothing but the typical baggage that comes with girls of her age.

But as Avery slips out of the house to go to a friend's party one night, and as Kyle gets ready to leave for a quick business rendez-vous, the Millers's immaculate home is broken into a by a group of violent thugs, led by Elias (Ben Mendelsohn) and his brother Jonah (Cam Gigandet). The group, a seemingly well-oiled operation at first, are also accompanied by Elias's volatile, drug-addled girlfriend Petal (Jordana Spiro) and a muscle-bound accomplice Ty (Dash Mihok), and as they threaten both Kyle and Sarah with imminent violence and demand that Kyle opens the family safe, cracks begin to show within the gang itself... cracks that only intensify when Avery stumbles back home to find a potential bloodbath... and an unexpected connection between one of the thugs and her mother. 

The first half hour practically whizzes by, and should leave you wondering why the film has such a bad rep: it's formulaic, yes, but it's smoothly directed and ticks all the right boxes, playing on our primal fear of home invasion and offering up the possibility of a good thrill or two. But when it finally sinks in that the film will consist of little more than repetitive shouting and gun-poking, you begin to doubt exactly how much work went into this mess. A subplot involving Jonah is not only implausible - a part of it is actually excused away by drugs (no spoilers here). Hitchcock it ain't.

It's nothing short of staggering, that a film with two Hollywood favourites tanks so badly, but it should also serve as a reminder: actors, no matter how illustrious their career, should always be taken with a pinch of salt because, at the end of the day, they are little more than hired hands. Granted that Cage is always a gamble - the films he appears in are crap just as often as they are good, to say nothing of his histrionic acting style - but having Kidman on board should count for something. Also, Schumacher has made legendary duds in the past (like Batman and Robin, which though lucrative, still prompted a gritty reboot of the superhero saga) but the fact remains that he's a serviceable thriller director who can surprise you at times (the cross-dressing black comedy Flawless is one example).

But the fact that the film failed at the box office despite certain 'correct' ingredients being in place should be seen as something positive. At the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding, and the fact that the film gets along at a healthy, frenetic pace, promising a simple concept stretched out competently, the ensuing twists just feel lazy and tacked on, shattering any hope of a tight thriller and exposing all of its faults as a derivative, schlocky mess.