Director: Julius Berg
Year: 2020
Country: United Kingdom
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Home Invasion
Plot:
Looking for a perfect score, a group of thugs breaks into a remote mansion owned by an older couple and begin looting the place, but when the homeowners return early the group find themselves forced to endure a series of nightmarish torture as the elderly owners turn the tables on them.
Review:
This was a highly problematic and troublesome entry. One of the biggest problems here is the absolutely unappealing group of main characters we’re supposed to be following around and feel sympathy towards. Brash, arrogant and hot-headed to the point of being caricatures of British thugs rather than real people which makes for a complete disconnect with them the second they show up on-screen, there’s never a sense of even caring about their plight with the exaggerated way they break into the house and start tearing things up or even cracking jokes on each other that are in no way funny. Since these are the people we’re following for the majority of the film and are supposed to feel sympathy towards once it starts getting crazy, it’s a tough sell to get to care about what’s going on here.
This turns into the other big problem here is the lack of anything original or creative in what’s going on. This is entirely predictable and riddled with cliches, from the disarray between the group that puts the captives in charge of the captors, the secretive nature of the elderly couple who foreshadow what’s to come, the psychological mind-games that bring the group down as they pit the kids against each other. It’s incredibly easy to see where this one is about to go every chance it gets and doesn’t do anything to really change the script for what keeps happening as the storyline plays out exactly as you think, causing the film to feel incredibly dull and plodding as a result. These are the films’ biggest drawbacks.
This does manage a few noticeable positives. Among the biggest aspects found here is the fine use of mind-games that come into play which keeps an appropriate air of suspense about their true intentions. While being plainly obvious the entire point is the series of mind-games based on their kindly demeanor hiding their true intentions, the change in tone and behavior becomes far more fun with the aggressive bent to their attitude once it shifts into their darker plans. Enhancing the action with some enjoyable confrontations that really make for a fun time here with some extra bloodshed thrown in, this section becomes the saving grace here with the most to like about the film although it’s too little too late to save this one.
Overview: */5
A bland, predictable and relatively routine home invasion effort that plays by every cliche imaginable while still only managing to get interesting in the finale, this one was the definition of an average and underwhelming effort. This is really only worthwhile for a fan of the creative crew or the most undemanding home-invasion fans, while most others won’t be swayed by this one all that much.
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