'Breaking In' - Review

★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆

This disappointingly pedestrian thriller from director James McTeigue (V for Vendetta, Sense8) takes itself and its straight-to-video trappings far too seriously to be enjoyable. Gabrielle Union stars as Shaun, a mother whose father has recently passed, leaving her his souped-up country house. She takes her two children for an overnight stay to arrange the sale of the house, when four men break in to steal her father’s stash of cash. They take her children hostage and she’s forced to thwart the state-of-the-art security measures to get them back.

I’m more than on board with the film’s feminist credentials, but the plot is so derivative and the dialogue so poor that it’s impossible to feel at all absorbed or entertained. The violence has no edge, and even the script feels doctored for a pre-watershed TV premiere (a villain actually says “Fricking” in a moment of rage). Union is the only likable screen presence, in the midst of classically precocious child actors and the assortment of muscly bores she’s pitted against. Billy Burke as the figurehead of the intruders looks contagiously bored, to the extent that yours truly actually found himself having a brief nap somewhere during the second act of the metronomic plot. I assume it was around the time Shaun tried to break in, then had to run away again, then snuck back to the house, then was forced to flee, then zzzzzZZZZZZZ