Breaking In
2 stars
Director: James McTeigue
Stars: Gabrielle Union, Billy Burke, Richard Cabral
Duration: 88 mins
Class: 15
KRS Releasing Ltd

Shaun Russell (Gabrielle Union) and her two children Jasmine (Ajiona Alexus) and Glover (Seth Carr) are spending the weekend at the Malibu mansion of her recently deceased estranged father, a man with a criminal past.

There to put the house on the market, Shaun and the children are unaware they are being watched by a gang of violent thieves led by Eddie (Billy Burke). These have broken into the house to steal the contents of a safe hidden somewhere inside.

The ‘home invasion’ movie is a popular sub-genre, the more successful entries in the genre preying on the notion of people’s personal and intimate space being violated, turning homes into a combat zone, and bringing people’s most basic survival instincts to the fore.

It is a genre that has offered some hugely popular and successful films. The premise of Breaking In – a mother protecting her children – recalls most especially the infinitely superior Panic Room, 2002’s thriller directed by David Fincher in which Jodie Foster and a pre-Twilight Kristen Stewart are trapped in the titular room, fending off the men who have broken into their home similarly in search of a safe and its contents.

That was a superbly-written and acted film that ratcheted up the tension from its opening moments to its nail-biting climax.  

 Breaking In is little more than a by-the-numbers entry in the genre, with very little by way of suspense but lots in way of cliché and plot holes.

Very little by way of suspense but lots in way of cliché and plot holes

The house is, as young Glover observes, a fortress, as the film is at pains to point out. It is a huge house with all domestic trappings imaginable and an elaborate security system in place.

There is a computer and multiple screens monitoring the indoor and outdoor alarms, surveillance cameras, shuttered windows and more. These ultimately do little to protect the family, and seemingly prove no obstacle at all for the perpetrators, who seem to have gotten into the house with remarkable ease.

The script by Ryan Engle proffers cardboard characters and hackneyed dialogue. Despite the efforts of a game Union, who throws herself wholeheartedly into the role, Shaun is very thinly-sketched, saddled with lines such as: “I’ll do anything to protect my kids” (Duh!); or, “I’m just a mom, you have no clue what I’m capable of!”.

‘Just’ a mom, you wonder? At least she’s ‘smart’, as Eddie condescendingly opines, in between snarling lines like “you are a woman, alone, at the mercy of strangers”.

Like Union, Burke tries to add some depth to the character but there’s only so much one can do. Eddie’s cohorts are also ridiculously one-dimensional – from the overly-tattooed Damien (Richard Cabral), a sneering psychotic figure, to the dithering Sam (Levi Meaden), clearly out of his depth.

None of them project any real menace, thereby offering very little tension in the run-up to the film’s obvious climax – which laughingly offers up horror films’ most overused trope.

The thin narrative is pumped up slightly by the action factor, and the film features numerous scenes of characters either running for their lives across the extensive grounds or tiptoeing across the house and hiding out in it myriad rooms (or hanging impossibly on the side of the staircase).

While it is too often punctuated by violence, a lot of it perpetrated on Union’s character as she is beaten, dragged across the house, and threatened with guns and knives as the kids cower in horror.