Trespass (2011) - Review

Trespass is a 2011 homme invasion movie starring Nicolas Cage, Nicole Kidman, Ben Mendelsohn, and Liana Liberato and is the last film directed by Joel Schumacher. Nicolas Cage stars as Kyle Miller, a diamond broker, Nicole Kidman as his wife Sarah, And Liana Liberato as the daughter Avery. The family seems normal, yet dysfunctional - Kyle obsessing over his work, Sarah trying to manage the teenage daughter all by herself, and Avery trying to live her life to the fullest while she is still young and protest her parents telling her otherwise. Ben Mendelsohn leads a group while they lead a home invasion to steal diamonds and cash from the well-to-do Miller family. Nothing is as simple as anyone had planned, and the two groups find themselves at odds while trying to get what they want at the expense of the other parties. 

This was a long 90 minutes, and I do not mean to compliment anyone. Less than 20 minutes into the runtime, the home invasion starts. While Nicolas Cage's Kyle Miller is doing everything he can to stall the would be thieves, the thieves have competing sets of loyalties and goals that they are trying to achieve, further complicating the robbery. This would be a normal part of a movie in this genre, but the movie has to think of contrivance after contrivance to string the viewer along. No information about the family is exposed upfront, leaving the backstory woven into revelations later in the movie - one red herring here, one explanation there, etc. It becomes very tiresome soon after the first 30 minutes of the movie. Even more damning to this film's credit is the fact that I didn't care what happened to anyone after a certain point - the only characters that garnered any sympathy from me were Kidman and Liberato's characters. When I find it really hard to sympathize with the main characters, and the movie is trying really hard to have you do so, something along the way has gone horribly wrong. It has been a while since I have reviewed the classic Nic Cage "freakouts" because I find that to be quite reductive, but in a movie that is driven solely on his ability to act absurd to string the villains along, it shows hope of delivering any payoff but fails when you're wanting the invasion to end. Even the more memorable lines of the movie is stated with such deadpan that might have to do with the character's exhaustion, but I had high hopes of witnessing the "etymology of the word diamond" monologue that I had a sort of Mandela effect placed upon it; I had thought that Cage would have delivered that line in a Deadfall-esque manner. (Edit: Deadfall is a 1993 Michael Biehn movie that Cage stars as a secondary antagonist. His character's blowups in that movie are quite legendary in my household). All in all, Trespass may be good for one viewing if you were really hard up while looking for another home invasion movie. Otherwise, it is a hard pass for me recommending to anyone.