Get out of our house!

Trespass

(2011)

Nic Cage continues cashing pay cheques in this reunion with Joel Schumacher (8mm anyone?) I expect this was greenlit as a post-crash Panic Room without the panic room.

Cage and wife Nicole Kidman experience a home invasion and Cage must use his wits to delay what he sees as their inevitable deaths.

The film requires a great many logic by-passes to sustain itself, as Cage refuses to open his safe to his captors in the first five minutes of their entry. But it nevertheless moves along at a clip in typically overwrought, flashy Schumacher manner.

Nicole Kidman has a nothing part and is unmemorable in it, but I enjoy a good slice of Cage ham and here he gets to play the mild-mannered business men suffering to the max. And still he manages to amp himself up to 11. Very stupid, but fun.

**1/2

Comments

I just hope my death makes more cents than my life.

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(SPOILERS) Perhaps, if Martin Scorsese hadn’t been so opposed to the idea of Marvel movies constituting cinema, The Irishman would have been a better film. It’s a decent film, assuredly. A respectable film, definitely. But it’s very far from being classic. And a significant part of that is down to the usually assured director fumbling the execution. Or rather, the realisation. I don’t know what kind of crazy pills the ranks of revered critics have been taking so as to recite as one the mantra that you quickly get used to the de-aging effects so intrinsic to its telling – as Empire magazine put it, “you soon… fuggadaboutit” – but you don’t. There was no point during The Irishman that I was other than entirely, regrettably conscious that a 75-year-old man was playing the title character. Except when he was playing a 75-year-old man.

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You're skipping Christmas! Isn't that against the law?

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For the majority of its first two hours, Casino Royale is top-flight entertainment, with returning director Martin Campbell managing to exceed his excellent work reformatting Bond for the ‘90s. That the weakest sequence (still good, mind) prior to the finale is a traditional “big” (but not too big) action set piece involving an attempt to…

I’m the famous comedian, Arnold Braunschweiger.

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It's their place, Mac. They have a right to make of it what they can. Besides, you can't eat scenery!

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