***CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS***
Tonight I'm reviewing the 2018 thriller ' Breaking In ' directed by James McTeigue (V for Vendetta and The Raven) and stars Gabrielle Union and Billy Burke. After her father's sudden death, Shaun Russell (Gabrielle Union) takes her son and daughter to her secluded, high-tech vacation home in the countryside. The family soon gets an unwelcome surprise when four men break into the house in search for hidden money. After escaping, Shaun must figure a way to turn the tables on the intruders. I wasn't expecting much from this movie to begin with. We've seen this same plot in at least 10 films a year. However, I was interested in it for only one reason and that is Billy Burke. I find him to be an underrated actor, especially when he plays a villain . If you don't remember, the last time he played a villain was in a movie called Drive Angry. He played the cult leader, which he was an absolute blast in and I find it to be a highly underrated movie. Unfortunately, he wasn't enough to save this movie. The film's cinematography was great. Gabrielle Union and Billy Burke were doable, but the script writing was absolutely bad. Some of their lines just felt like something you would see on a very low budget thriller film you'd find on Netflix, like something you would see from a cheap Steven Seagal film. It didn't help that Billy Burke himself looked very bored in the movie. The plot was jumping everywhere. At one point, she's in the house and then another, she's not in the house that it kept doing that back and forth throughout the whole movie; same with the villains. The villains couldn't decide if they wanted to get the money, go after her or do both. Other than Billy Burke, I just couldn't stand the other three villains. It looked like the director picked them off of the streets. They couldn't be any more standard. I also had a hard time seeing Gabriel Union doing stealth stuff when her character has never been in that kind of predicament before and makes it feel too Hollywoodish.
***MINOR SPOILERS BELOW***
The one MAJOR thing that pissed me off the most about this film is the fact that they underused Billy Burke and went with one of the villains I hated the most and made him the main villain. The bad guys went out very weak, which was very anti-climatic.
Final Grade:
What were your thoughts on this film? Leave me a comment below and I'll see you on my next review.