Ratings:
The Daily: 1 of 5 stars
Rotten Tomatoes: 22%
More on 'Trespass'
IMDB
Official Website
“Trespass” opens with Nicolas Cage piloting a Porsche down picturesque Louisiana roads, screaming into his cellphone at some unspecified banker or real estate functionary. “You’re bleeding us dry!” he exclaims, blasting through the security doors of his gated community. Cage’s Kyle Miller is a diamond dealer without customers, with a big modernist house that is getting bigger by the second, its new and unfinished wing a mess of plastic tarps, wood framing and used-up home equity.
It being 2011, and the economy being what it is, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood took it upon itself to attempt a mortgage thriller. And the symbolism of “Trespass” is apt, if unintentional — its two Oscar-winning stars, Cage and Nicole Kidman, two former powerhouse enterprises fallen on facially (and, in one case, financially) weird hard times; its director, Joel Schumacher, a walking derivative, a once-viable investment (“The Lost Boys,” “Falling Down”) long since turned empty and sour and wrong (“Batman & Robin,” “Phone Booth,” “Twelve,” etc.).
The joke is that “Trespass” is a home invasion film in which the home and its contents are mostly worthless and underwater. Cage’s character, we learn quickly enough, is more or less on the crackers-in-the-empty-briefcase stage of his career; his wife, Sarah (Kidman), is the sort of bored, homebound woman who totes a glass of red wine from empty room to empty room. She listlessly exchanges meaningful glances with the handsome, tattooed security contractor (Cam Gigandet) installing their alarm system; in turn, he brings a band of incompetent goons to rob her and her husband. Yelling, plot reversals and light torture ensue.
The script, from Karl Gajdusek, compels Cage to explain with a straight face the etymology of the word “diamond” (Greek for unbreakable!) and includes among the invaders a crack-smoking stripper whose purpose is to freak out at 12-minute intervals, when the action, such as it is, starts running low on energy. This happens a lot, despite a whole battery of countdowns and final warnings and wild speeches from Cage about why he won’t open the family safe, even as gun after gun is pointed in the vicinity of the head of his sultry daughter (Liana Liberato, here looking eerily like porn queen Sasha Grey). Kidman, meanwhile, is reduced to varieties of pleading and having her neck breathed on by various sweat-soaked dudes.
Class (“If that’s the way you want it, yuppie!”), sexual betrayal (“Your filthy lust invited them in!”) and the plight of the modern worker (“I’m a middleman living on credit!”) are invoked, then summarily set aside, as the film’s increasingly baroque twists undo every flimsy premise Schumacher creakily attempts to establish. In the end, the message seems to be: The person who can keep from cracking up the longest in a bad situation wins. Or at least survives.
The strange Hollywood compulsion to continuously revisit a scenario in which a family begins the movie estranged from one another and ends in a bloody, sobbing group hug is worth examining more closely, though probably not in relation to “Trespass,” which is so incompetent and poorly executed that it can barely be said to have intentions at all. “Leave my family alone,” Cage growls, stealing a line that Harrison Ford has long since patented and made his own. And the sight of the paterfamilias striding through a windy, unbuilt wing of his home, shotgun in hand, could have come from a far more intelligent and self-aware film, one in which the usually concealed relationships among violence, capital and domestic alienation are made explicit. “Trespass” is not that film.
The Daily: 1 of 5 stars
Rotten Tomatoes: 22%
More on 'Trespass'
IMDB
Official Website
“Trespass” opens with Nicolas Cage piloting a Porsche down picturesque Louisiana roads, screaming into his cellphone at some unspecified banker or real estate functionary. “You’re bleeding us dry!” he exclaims, blasting through the security doors of his gated community. Cage’s Kyle Miller is a diamond dealer without customers, with a big modernist house that is getting bigger by the second, its new and unfinished wing a mess of plastic tarps, wood framing and used-up home equity.
It being 2011, and the economy being what it is, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood took it upon itself to attempt a mortgage thriller. And the symbolism of “Trespass” is apt, if unintentional — its two Oscar-winning stars, Cage and Nicole Kidman, two former powerhouse enterprises fallen on facially (and, in one case, financially) weird hard times; its director, Joel Schumacher, a walking derivative, a once-viable investment (“The Lost Boys,” “Falling Down”) long since turned empty and sour and wrong (“Batman & Robin,” “Phone Booth,” “Twelve,” etc.).
The joke is that “Trespass” is a home invasion film in which the home and its contents are mostly worthless and underwater. Cage’s character, we learn quickly enough, is more or less on the crackers-in-the-empty-briefcase stage of his career; his wife, Sarah (Kidman), is the sort of bored, homebound woman who totes a glass of red wine from empty room to empty room. She listlessly exchanges meaningful glances with the handsome, tattooed security contractor (Cam Gigandet) installing their alarm system; in turn, he brings a band of incompetent goons to rob her and her husband. Yelling, plot reversals and light torture ensue.
The script, from Karl Gajdusek, compels Cage to explain with a straight face the etymology of the word “diamond” (Greek for unbreakable!) and includes among the invaders a crack-smoking stripper whose purpose is to freak out at 12-minute intervals, when the action, such as it is, starts running low on energy. This happens a lot, despite a whole battery of countdowns and final warnings and wild speeches from Cage about why he won’t open the family safe, even as gun after gun is pointed in the vicinity of the head of his sultry daughter (Liana Liberato, here looking eerily like porn queen Sasha Grey). Kidman, meanwhile, is reduced to varieties of pleading and having her neck breathed on by various sweat-soaked dudes.
Class (“If that’s the way you want it, yuppie!”), sexual betrayal (“Your filthy lust invited them in!”) and the plight of the modern worker (“I’m a middleman living on credit!”) are invoked, then summarily set aside, as the film’s increasingly baroque twists undo every flimsy premise Schumacher creakily attempts to establish. In the end, the message seems to be: The person who can keep from cracking up the longest in a bad situation wins. Or at least survives.
The strange Hollywood compulsion to continuously revisit a scenario in which a family begins the movie estranged from one another and ends in a bloody, sobbing group hug is worth examining more closely, though probably not in relation to “Trespass,” which is so incompetent and poorly executed that it can barely be said to have intentions at all. “Leave my family alone,” Cage growls, stealing a line that Harrison Ford has long since patented and made his own. And the sight of the paterfamilias striding through a windy, unbuilt wing of his home, shotgun in hand, could have come from a far more intelligent and self-aware film, one in which the usually concealed relationships among violence, capital and domestic alienation are made explicit. “Trespass” is not that film.
