Breaking In

First Hit: The best part of the film was that the mother won.

As a suspense film it wasn’t great, however it definitely kept my interest and despite knowing the ending, Shaun Russell (Gabrielle Union) as the main character, gave the audience great intensity.

Shaun’s father Issac (Damien Leake), is a wealthy man who was being indicted in federal court for theft. Out for a run before going to court, he is killed by a truck driven by Sam (Levi Meaden).

Shaun, with her children Jasmine and Glover (Ajiona Alexus and Seth Carr respectively) go out to Issac’s country mansion to clean it up and removed things she may want before she sells it. This house is huge, far from the city and neighbors, and very high-tech.

However, upon reaching the house she suspects that something is wrong and soon finds out that four men are in the house looking for a safe. The killing of Issac, we learn, was planned so that Eddie (Billy Burke), Duncan (Richard Cabral), Peter (Mark Furze), and Sam could rob the home.

To leverage their power over Shaun, the leader Eddie, has the other 3 capture and hold her two children as hostages. The thieves’ hope is to leverage holding her children hostage for knowledge about the location of the safe.

There are several scenes where Shaun gets the better of her children’s’ captors. What didn’t work very well was Sam. In his role, although he tried to sound in control and menacing to both his work team and Shaun, there was a lack of strength and surety of his character. In other words he wasn't quite believable.

I think the house could have been used more as a character than it was. The amount of high-tech in the house and using it to trick or thwart the robbers could have made it more interesting, especially if the kids took control. They did a couple of times, but not enough to make it really stand out.

Union was strong as the mother you didn’t want to cross. She showed athleticism as well and intuitive intelligence in this role. Meaden was very good as the semi-reluctant thief although the idea to rob this home was originally his. Alexus and Carr were excellent as the children. They both created age appropriate interests and actions and the right amount of duress. Burke was good but there was one point in the film, I wondered why the other thieves didn’t just kill him and take over the robbery. Cabral was the best of the thieves. He show immense intimidating intensity. Furze had the smallest robber role and it was OK. Ryan Engle wrote a good script but, as I said, I would have like a better group of thieves and the house could have used more. James McTeigue did a good job of directing the actors in this script. It lacked a certain creativeness, but the film worked.

Overall: I like when the main character is rightfully and clearly driven to save the day, that it was a woman, a mother, made it better.

Twilight

First Hit: The young teen girls in the theater cheered and swooned, the rest of us watched a mediocre story that was generally poorly acted.

Stephanie Myers wrote a book about a young girl falling in love with a vampire whose family only drinks animal blood (the vegetarians of vampires), not the blood of humans.

Kristen Stewart plays Bella the young girl having to move from Arizona to a small town in Washington State where her father lives. She is the new girl in school and becomes immediately attracted to one particular boy who is very pale and doesn’t come to school on sunny days.

The boy, Edward (played by Robert Patterson), hangs out with his family. His relatives all go to school together. They look and act a lot older than the rest of the high school kids which is mostly because they’ve been stuck at approximately age 17 for hundreds of years.

Edward is confused by and attracted to Bella because she is the only person whose mind he cannot read. She is fascinated by his shy reluctance, cute paleness, and brooding nature.

The film is about their trials and tribulations of becoming an accepted couple by their families and the community. Just as things start going well, a renegade trio of human blood sucking vampires come across Bella and would like to suck her blood. This, of course, leads to a fierce battle between two vampire types.

Stewart plays her character reasonably well as does Billy Burke who plays her quiet introverted policeman father. I didn’t think Patterson did much with his character except to look sullen, needy and wanting to be saved from his destiny. The story seemed haphazard and all over the place with filler stories trying to make this whole thing plausible. Catherine Hardwicke, who directed a very good Lords of Dogtown, did well to keep this thing on a track. I just don’t know if it was a poor story or a poor translation of the book.

Overall: There must be something about young girls wanting to save or fall in love with a vampire because the girls in the theater got off on this film. I think that a more interesting story would have been to explore the local Indians who made a deal with the vampires centuries ago. This was only briefly touched on a few times during the film.