It feels like a while since we saw a straight-ahead family-in-peril thriller, without monsters or supernatural bells and whistles. This effort, from V For Vendetta director James McTeigue, therefore feels both throwback and fresh, but while his leading lady gives it her all, it can't overcome a script that's too thoroughly rooted in genre cliches.
We meet Shaun (Gabrielle Union) on her way to clear out her childhood home after her father's death. Her kids are with her, teenager Jasmine (Ajiona Alexus) and pre-teen Glover (Seth Carr). But when they get to the remote and sprawling country house (both location and size are relevant) they find subtle signs that something is off. Shaun's father, a fraudster, has armoured the house, and they soon learn why when strange men led by Eddie (Billy Burke) appear and take the kids hostage.
These four desperadoes are after money hidden somewhere in the house and will theoretically stop at nothing to find it. Only they keep the kids alive for one reason after another - though only one seems cursed with a conscience - and can't find and stop one middle-aged woman as she fights back.
Union's performance is a reminder that she should be a much, much bigger star.
Union is great, switching on a dime from terror to determination and hitting just the level of competence in the action scenes so that you buy that she's fit and strong and never misses a yoga class, but can see that she's not a trained fighter. Her performance is a reminder that she should be a much, much bigger star, and command much more polished scripts than this. Alexus and Carr are also miraculously non-annoying as her kids, though their family dynamic is perhaps one scene short of being fully developed. There's a whole backstory with Shaun's father and her unhappy childhood that's similarly undercooked, while the bad guys are barely sketched at all beyond bossy (Burke), ineffectual (Levi Meaden), exposition-offering (Mark Furze) and Pure Evil (Richard Cabral).
Much of the running and hiding works to create tension, at least, and both McTeigue and Shaun make clever use of the environment. But it's basically a film about people running into and out of a large house, and if that's all you have, you need sharper character and dialogue work than this. It's interesting to see a mother driven to desperate measures to save her kids instead of the usual patriarchal super-father tropes, but in the end this tough mama feels like a flip of the same coin.
