Mark Reviews Movies: BREAKING IN (2018)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 10, 2018

Give Breaking In this much credit: Once the action gets going, Ryan Engle's screenplay continuously finds ways to keep it going. This isn't a tightly constructed thriller, but it is a compact one, wasting only enough time that we see its eventual captives as slightly more than pawns in a life-or-death game involving a home break-in. Once the protagonist starts fighting back, the movie doesn't offer much time for the characters to breathe.

These things are tricky. A plot such as this is overly familiar. The need to keep upping the ante almost always results in characters doing stupid things to keep the plot moving. In that light, this movie does deserve some credit for a few things: discovering a slightly clever twist on the usual home-invasion plot, providing a heroine whose techniques never stretch believability and only occasionally make us question her reasoning, and coming to an end just before the constant turning of the tables would start to seem too ridiculous.

It also confirms what we might have suspected about Gabrielle Union for a decade or so: She can carry a movie on her own, without playing third fiddle in a male-dominated actioner or being lost among the crowd in supporting roles and comic ensembles. Here, she gets to play an ordinary woman who's forced to do some intelligent, daring, and sometimes violent things in order to save her children from a quartet of burglars.

In certain ways, this is a pretty thankless and routine role, but Union makes it fully believable. There are no super-heroics or preternatural feats for the character to perform. She's simply resourceful, desperate, and driven by the horrifying fear of losing her kids.

After a prologue involving an older man being hit by a car (the first of the movie's attempts to startle us by making something quickly appear in frame), Shaun (Union) and her children, Jasmine (Ajiona Alexus) and Glover (Seth Carr), are on their way to her childhood home. The dead man was Shaun's estranged father, and she has decided to sell the old house.

There's a strange, under-explained back story involving the father, his activities, and the reason he and his daughter hadn't been on speaking terms. It involves a criminal case, apparently, and the father's attempt to push the blame on Shaun.

The point of this inexplicable exposition is solely to give a rationale for how the team of burglars chose this house to rob. Their calm, calculating leader is Eddie (Billy Burke). His cohorts are the relatively decent Sam (Levi Meaden), the murderous wildcard Duncan (Richard Cabral), and Peter (Mark Furze), who ends up a disposable punching bag.

When the family arrives, the four men are already at the house—a "fortress," according to Glover, of security cameras and motion sensors. The thieves are looking for the father's safe, which apparently contains all of the funds he liquidated after that unclear criminal prosecution stuff. Whatever the back story may be, the end result is that the robbers take the two kids hostage, while Shaun is locked out of the house.

This is the twist on the typical formula of such a plot. The robbers have the advantage of hostages and weapons, as per usual, but they also possess the advantage of shelter—a house that, by way of its elaborate security system, can alert them if Shaun gets within 15 feet of the exterior walls or, somehow, finds her way inside. Shaun, on the other hand, is left with nothing, except a goon chasing her, a stretch of desolate woods, and an increasing sense of terror about what will become of her children.

Engle has flipped the expected power dynamic of this familiar scenario. This means that Shaun has to be tougher, cleverer, and more willing to put herself at risk than we might anticipate. Her maneuvers to get into the house turn out to be fairly simple (thanks to a conveniently open garage door), but in the moment when she decides to act, making a mad dash to shatter all of the house's exterior security lights, Engle and director James McTeigue basically give us a lengthy game of cat-and-mouse inside the house and on the property.

It's effective to a degree, even though the thieves have to be a little too dumb to ignore the obvious (Eddie goes on a wild goose chase with a drone, allowing Shaun plenty of time to make the security cameras work in her favor). There's also the matter of the house coming across like a maze on account of McTeigue's trickery (repeatedly making us think a bad guy is closer to Shaun than he actually is). It becomes increasingly disconcerting how willing the movie is to put the kids in peril. Such things are almost requirements in a movie like this, but that doesn't make them any less distracting from what's otherwise a pretty efficient thriller.

For what it is, the movie almost works. The little details matter a lot in a minimalist thriller like this, and maybe Breaking In doesn't quite live up to its dynamic-shifting premise because it ignores or sidesteps the details that allow us to follow along with Shaun's strategy. Maybe, though, it's just a run-of-the-mill home-invasion thriller that occasionally does a competent job of fooling us into thinking that it's different.

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