I’m getting a little tired of home invasion movies. They can be very effective, but the trend toward making the intruders masked makes all of the stories feel a little predictable. It’s nice that there’s a touch of variation in this one by making the lead blind, but even that seems like a homage to Wait Until Dark, which felt like more of a Hitchcock thriller.
I didn’t mind this movie. I actually felt like they handled her blindness reasonably well, except for one trivial detail. She uses braille. My mom is blind, so I’ve been exposed to the blind world a good amount. Braille has become less popular, as the tools to have text read aloud have become more accessible. It isn’t clear how long the girl has been blind (if I checked the start of the movie again, they may have referenced it) but I don’t think she would have picked up braille that quickly.
There were two things that bothered me, and both of them were late in the movie. First, there’s a reveal where it turns out that the masked person in a raincoat that we’ve been seeing is actually three different people dressed the same. For anyone watching the movie, this is not a revelation. It’s obvious. The second is actually a plot point. The girl is hiding in the garage. Above the garage is a room where the invaders are planning to kill her father. She uses a chainsaw from the garage, and manages to lift it up, and stab it through the ceiling, cutting into an invader.
First, pushing a chainsaw through a wall, especially a lower power, electric one like she was using, would be nearly impossible to do as smoothly as she does.
Second, the ceiling of the garage is probably at least eight feet high, based on the way it’s photographed during the movie. Some simple math makes it clear that there’s no way she could raise the chainsaw above her head and push it through the floor, and have enough sticking through the floor to impale the guy. Honestly, I’d be surprised if she was able to touch the ceiling with the saw.
One other thing that bothered me. We get an obligatory scene where someone gets killed when they’re dressed up like one of the bad guys. It’s bad enough that we get to see this cliche in action again, but what makes it worse is how obvious it is. The guy is squirming around, his hands bound behind his back. He’s desperately trying to talk. I could forgive using this cliche to raise the body count if the scenario was a little different. If the guy was shot a greater distance. Instead, he’s shot close range, and the father has plenty of time to see that this is not a threat to him.
Given how old Wait Until Dark is, I guess it’s alright to appropriate it.
Even though I’ve just spent time running down the ways that the movie bothered me, it’s actually not bad. It’s predictable, but it’s fairly well-made, and she’s reasonably convincing as a blind girl.
No comments:
Post a Comment