In between an "Avengers" movie, an "X-Men" movie, and a "Star Wars" movie. What else is there to watch?
Gabrielle Union seems like an actress that doesn’t quite get the due that she deserves. Her ability to convey sheer conviction within whatever script she is working with often makes her a solid and productive aspect of any good movie that she is in and a saving grace for the ones that are bad.
She is always enjoyable to see on screen but in the case of “Breaking In,” her filmography has received a new entry to be classified in the category of the latter.
Playing a mother that has to spend the weekend at her countryside childhood home with her children to finalize the sale of the estate following the sudden death of her estranged father, Union manages to hold her own admirably as she struggles to fight for her and her family’s lives when four burglars break into the mansion and hold the family hostage in their search to loot a hidden safe containing the departed man’s illicit riches.
The ordeal that ensues however is far from thrilling despite relying on its leads performance to carry the movie through.
“Breaking In” is a rather difficult movie to truly discuss not because it must be shrouded in secret from the ears of those that haven’t seen it or because it’s bad in ways that defy conventional explanation but simply because there really isn’t anything to it.
With the obvious discomfort Union conveys at being at the house implying a tumultuous childhood that is expounded upon in several conversations throughout the movie all leading to a film in which the set up requires her to break into a place of bad memories for her, one would think that the film would carry some sort of allegory about facing personal pains, fears and insecurities for the greater good of oneself and those that they love but the truth is that the entire movie feels bizarrely void of any dramatic heft whatsoever.
Despite the exposition laden opening 10 to 15 minutes of the movie, “Breaking In,” in fact seems to go out of its way to be the most uninteresting execution of a thin concept as possible.
Some of the burglars occasionally have faceoffs with Union in which she proclaims that they’re underestimating her despite them never having denigrated her in a way to imply that and in fact go out of their way to regularly treat her as a genuine threat. These kinds of little quirks and cop outs are littered throughout the film and leave behind a series of standard thriller sequences so perfunctory and visually unremarkable in its execution that it doesn’t frustrate so much as it simply bores.
Billy Burke portrays the leader of his cartoonish henchman, whose charisma and levelheadedness provide the only thing in the film outside of Union’s performance that remains particularly engaging.
His witty commentary on every phase of the plan coming undone almost feels as though the filmmakers put him there to beat the audience to the punch of picking apart just how flimsy the movie is.
4 Home Invasions out of 10
To call “Life of the Party” a waste of every resource that went into making it would be something of an understatement.
It’s a waste of the efforts involving anybody working on its
production whose flat and lifeless aesthetic makes network television sitcoms
look like technical masterpieces comparatively. It’s a waste of energy for the
actors who aren’t walking away with any impressive additions to their resume
given the poor delivery of every badly written line needing to desperately not
upstage its underwhelming star.
The writers, what little effort was put into this thing’s
hollow shell of a script, disastrously waste their time and energy along with
the director by making an inferior version of a decades old thoroughly explored
concept.
Above all else however, it’s a spectacular waste of Melissa
McCarthy’s talent, loosening reigns that she is clearly in desperate need of to
uncover her best material in favor of flailing and babbling loudly until a
punch line lacking joke with some potential surfaces to put a scene out of its
misery.
Divorced suddenly by her husband for another woman, McCarthy
plays a mother that decides to follow her previously abandoned dream of
achieving a degree in archaeology at the same college that her mother attends.
Mother and daughter shenanigans aside, anybody that’s been
to college at some point in the last 20 years or so would know that college
populations are usually as diverse as they come. White or Black, Domestic or
Foreign, and even young and old of all genders, shapes and sizes all mill about
and are fairly common.
The idea of using somebody’s age and status as one long out
of place punch line is a majorly inauthentic idiosyncrasy indicative of exactly
why “Life of the Party” sucks.
Only the absolute barest minimum of effort was put into
every key aspect of filmmaking in the name of allowing McCarthy to do what they
all apparently believe that she is best at. Unfortunately, even though those
elements would be distractingly poor if her comedic chops were up to snuff, her
bumbling clown act gets really old really fast and goes the extra mile to not
only be bad improvisation that doesn’t match the circumstances of its set up
but flat out ruins actual set ups and punch lines that could have been
hilarious had they been half the length and timed their landing.
“Life of the Party” is one of those surreally bad non-movies
that slip their way into theaters based on the nepotism of its involved stars,
coaxing a chuckle or two out that you immediately regret giving within 20
seconds when you realize that you’re watching a comedy that doesn’t know how to
let a joke die.
An improvised 3 out of a Scripted 10
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