Kin falls short of matching its ambitions

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

'Allegiant' makes no sense

Theo James and Shailene Woodley are set to kiss at an inopportune moment in "Allegiant." Image courtesy Lionsgate.

It’s clear the filmmakers behind “Allegiant,” the newest entry in the “Divergent” series, had a very specific audience in mind when they opted to make this film. The actors are very pretty, the dialogue is very simplistic, the plot is very straightforward, and the plot holes are big enough for a tank to drive through. So, perhaps but hopefully perhaps not, this film might work for the target audience, but anyone outside of that core demographic is in for a very bumpy ride.

“Allegiant” picks up right after the end of its predecessor “Insurgent,” which came out in 2015. The gate that separated Chicago from the rest of the world has opened, but new leader Evelyn (Naomi Watts, one of many people far too good for this film) prevents anyone from leaving. Instead, she hosts a series of trials to execute the enforcers who served under the previous regime. Not happy with how things are going, series protagonist/The Special Tris (Shailene Woodley) recruits her boyfriend Four (Theo James, aka diet Paul Walker) and a few friends from the other two films in the series (Miles Teller, Ansel Elgort and Zoë Kravitz) to see exactly what life is like on the other side of the fence and to see if the grass is indeed greener.

What they discover is a futuristic society (or one even more so than the future they exist in) headed by David (Jeff Daniels), a researcher who uses Chicago as a sort of experiment to see if humanity can rid itself of the defective character traits that define life in the Windy City. Woodley, as the chosen one, is the key to his research, and he recruits her to meet up with a special council to save the denizens of her home town. Things aren't exactly going swimmingly there though; Octavia Spencer's Johanna is waging a war against Watts for control of the city to restore the factions Woodley and friends fought to destroy, and things are getting out of hand fast. Daniels' David could be the last hope to prevent a civil war, or are his motives could be far more nefarious than Woodley suspects (yes, they are). Regardless, shenanigans encompassing ships, angst, memory erasing, kidnapping, more angst, flying hockey pucks, and a hint more angst for the young stars ensue. –

“Allegiant’s” flaws are legion. It’s generally poorly acted – the high profile names are not invested in this endeavor – and impressively hideous aesthetically with some god awful CGI, and even features dialogue that’s often redundant and definitely overly simplistic even for a film aimed at tweens. The hallmark though are the plot holes, the gaps in logic that keep cropping up because the team of writers enlisted to write this travesty don’t know what to do with their characters. To use an old Roger Ebert concept, the entirety of “Allegiant's” plot machinations is dependent on people acting dumb and, in several cases, against their own or anyone else's interest. Daniels' David, who (spoiler) becomes the film's big bad, can undermine the entire counter operation run by Woodley's Tris and her friends without leaving his office. Or, at least, he should be able to enact his master plan with the flip of a switch from his couch in his boxers while watching “RuPaul's Drag Race.” But he doesn't, and he never designs his grand experiment to be able to do enact his plan, because “Allegiant” makes little to no sense as a concept or as a film.

Yet, somehow, this is actually worse than “Insurgent.” At least that one had a solid grip on the relationship between Woodley's Tris and the appropriately handsome James, who work effectively as partners (admittedly a strength of the series). This time, for some reason, the writers have James' Four pull an Aidan and devolve into a misogynistic chazz to make Woodley’s Tris feel bad. There's also no good reason why the writers opt to make Watts' Evelyn as erratic as she is; it's as if they can't decide if they should make her Eleanor Iselin, Margaret Thatcher, Mussolini, or some strange hybrid of the three.

Little about “Allegiant” makes any sense. Even the full title listed at IMDB “The Divergent Series: Allegiant – Part 1” is undercut by the name of the next film in the franchise, “Ascendant,” meaning “Allegiant” doesn't technically have a part two. Sadly, there is still at least one more film left to go in this franchise, and if it follows the pattern set by the last two “Divergent” films, it's not going to end well for anyone.

Review: One and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 121 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away

Target audience: Fans of the book series and people interested in less well-developed “Hunger Games” knockoffs.

Take the whole family?: For a series targeted at tweens, there is a whole lot of shooting and murdering going on. In other words, not so much for the little ones.

Theater or Netflix?: Stay away if you can.

Is there anything to recommend about this movie?: Miles Teller is the series MVP, often serving as an audience surrogate to point out how stupid these films are. Something that always tickles me about these films is the use of banal first names to identify the villains. The series tries very hard to make their villains frightening, but names like David, Evelyn and Jeanine just aren’t intimidating.

Watch this instead?: “Gattaca” addressed all of the moral implications raised in “Allegiant” with a deft touch and a hint of creepiness that makes it worth seeking out.