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| Myles Truitt in Kin. Image courtesy Lionsgate. |
Kin
has
a scattered mind. The movie has a lot of ideas
skittering
around, topics
it addresses fleetingly or inconsistently. There
are plots and themes aplenty, but no vision for how to tell the
story, nor a simple direction for the plot to go. That's the problem
with a scattered mind; it goes all over the place without completing
a single thought.
Kin
has a lot it
could be about.
It's about a 14-year-old outcast named Eli (Myles Truitt) who
stumbles upon alien technology. It's about his older brother and
ex-con Jimmy (Jack Reynor) doing his best to evade the consequences
of his action. It's about a single father (Dennis Quaid) doing the
best he can to raise his sons. It's about the roaming exotic dancer
Milly (Zoë Kravitz) learning to trust again. It's about psychotic
gangster Taylor (James Franco) hellbent on revenge for his own fallen
kin. It's about the destruction of a city. It's about bonding with
family on the road. It's about the lies we tell to keep going in
life. It's about bonding on the road. It's about doing the right
thing when the opportunity arises to do it. It's about protecting
one's family from their own worst habits. It's about getting lost in
youth and growing up. It’s
about how time on the road can bring people closer together. But
Kin
feels incomplete despite touching on so many themes.
Because the movie can't commit to any of these stories and themes to
tell a clean, coherent story or have a consistent narrative thread.
It's shotgun art, the paint shot against the wall to create something
resembling art, but instead coming out as splattered gunk in which
brilliance is seen with the head tilted at the right angle and the
eyes squinted just enough.
The fault
lies with filmmakers Jonathan and Josh Baker, who adapted their short
film Bag
Man
into this feature length flick. From watching the short, it's clear
the Bakers couldn't come up with a clean
method
to translate a simple, direct 12-minute film into the 102 minute mess
they came up with. The problem goes
beyond
the push to incorporate as many ideas as possible into the film
to include
the simple execution of their stories. Kin
has one of the most egregious idiot plots in recent film history, in
which a 14-year-old boy is duped into believing a whopper of a lie
without questioning the motivation. Despite the circumstances that
incite the lie, Eli's clear understanding of the people around him,
and the illogical nature of sudden road trips, Eli never digs
into Jimmy
why they’re
going on their trip. The reveal for Eli comes through in a clunky,
awkward fashion that reinforces just how gullible Eli has been for
almost two-thirds of the movie.
There's no good
reason for why the Bakers opted to make their central character so
remarkably dim, but it ends up making him an uninteresting character,
and it gives Truitt almost nothing to work with to build his
character.
Then
again, few characters in this film are
allowed moments
of depth or interest.
Milly exists because the Bakers needed a woman in the narrative;
she's not allowed to do anything noteworthy. Jimmy is selfish and
stupid, hiding information from his brother for reasons that never
make a lot of sense. Franco's character is designed to be weird and
uncomfortable, a role he has succeeded at in the past. Yet Franco
doesn't go far enough with the material he has, restraining himself
from dipping into the madness the character justly deserves, and
giving the movie the
cartoonish villain
it drastically needs to stave off the encroaching sense of boredom
that hits after the first act.
By default some of this has to work. The first few
moments of Eli navigating through a broken Detroit alone is graceful,
and there are elements of the road trip between Eli and Jimmy that
have a quiet charm to them. Kin
does a decent enough job using montages to show the relationship
between the strained siblings growing, eliding over unnecessary
dialog. At least, it does with this story, because there is still
plenty of fat dialog spreading all over the place, especially in the
big, useless twist at the end telegraphed poorly by the Bakers. Kin
offered the Bakers a chance to build a nice little universe, but they
just don’t know how to use their space efficiently.
Review:
Two out of Five Stars
Click here to see the trailer.
Rating:
PG-13
Run
time: 102 minutes
Genre:
Sci-Fi
tl;dr
What
Worked: The small
moments on the road, the first
shots of Eli
What
Fell Short: The
story,
acting, premise, and James Franco
What
To Watch As Well:
Attack
the Block, Chronicle, Spring Breakers
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