Breaking In: Well-crafted suspense

Breaking In (2018) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for violence, dramatic intensity, sexual references and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang

Modest thrillers can be quite entertaining, because they don’t come with the “baggage” associated with major studio productions. The stars and filmmakers are content to deliver a solid story in straightforward fashion.

Having temporarily evaded the lethal thugs searching each room, Shaun (Gabrielle Union,
right) assures her daughter Jasmine (Ajiona Alexus) that they absolutely will survive this
nightmare. The girl isn't so sure...

2002’s Panic Room and 2005’s Red Eye come to mind; intriguingly, both feature strong female protagonists battling against insidious male opponents, and against seemingly overwhelming odds.

Director James McTeigue’s Breaking In belongs in their company: an equally clever premise and execution from scripter Ryan Engle; and a rousing, hard-charging performance from star Gabrielle Union. She’s absolutely believable as a mother bear determined to persevere — willing to do whatever it takes — in order to protect her children.

The fact that she’s also smart and resourceful, is the even more satisfying cherry on top.

McTeigue and Engle also understand the most important rule of storytelling: They know when to get off the stage. Their film runs an economical 88 minutes, which feels just right. No wasted footage, no extraneous nonsense.

Events begin with an unusual prologue involving a lone jogger: an event left unexplained until it dovetails nicely with subsequent events. Meanwhile, Shaun Russell (Union) has reluctantly sacrificed a weekend and brought her children along — teenage Jasmine (Ajiona Alexus) and adolescent Glover (Seth Carr) — in order to prepare her late father’s isolated ranch estate for sale.

The immense house is nestled amid acres of surrounding forest; the equally massive grounds include empty horse barns and various outbuildings. Shaun, long estranged from her father, and from a childhood laden with unhappy memories, hasn’t seen the place for years. She and her children are surprised to discover that the house is a high-tech fortress, complete with surveillance cameras, impenetrable window shutters and a computer monitoring system worthy of a Las Vegas casino.

What was her father hiding from?

More to the point — for our purposes — why does cinematographer Toby Oliver keep following our trio, as they split up to explore the place, with unsettling tracking shots that elevate the hairs on the back of our necks?

We viewers are well trained in cinema technique; we know it’s because They’re Being Watched.

Untraceable: Unwatchable

Untraceable (2008) • View trailer
No stars (turkey). Rating: R, for profanity and excruciating, exploitative violence and torture
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.31.08

The trouble with culturing a disease is that the little buggers inevitably escape the petri dish.

Horror films are designed to be outrageous; they cater to a specific viewership that worships at the alter of torture-porn slime such as the Hostel and Saw series.

FBI cybercrime special agent Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane, center) and Portland
police detective Eric Box (Billy Burke, far right) watch in horror, along with
the rest of Marsh's colleagues, as another poor victim is tortured to death on a
Web site run by a tech-savvy Internet predator.

Indeed, it could be argued that horror films — like any other aspect of youth culture — aren't doing their job unless they offend and otherwise dismay mainstream society.

It's an entirely different matter, however, when such reprehensible garbage oozes from the fringe element and emerges with a deceptive outer layer of respectable clothing, designed specifically to entice the unwary.

In the case of Untraceable, the respectable clothing is worn by star Diane Lane, a veteran actress with a long list of credits stretching back to The Outsiders and The Cotton Club, who more recently copped an Oscar nomination for Unfaithful and indulged her romantic side in Under the Tuscan Sun.

Her presence here adds bogus legitimacy to an otherwise worthless piece of trash from a director — Gregory Hoblit — determined to rub our noses in precisely the sort of ghastly, grisly mayhem that has become de rigueur in horror flicks such as those cited above.

To call Untraceable tasteless is the worst of understatements.

Mainstream cop thrillers should be able to survive on tension and character development, and in fairness scripter Robert Fyvolent tries to get some juice going between FBI cybercrime special agent Jennifer Marsh (Lane) and police detective Eric Box (Billy Burke, wholly unmemorable). But Lane and Burke have zero chemistry ... or maybe it's just that Hoblit couldn't be bothered to encourage them to create any.

The story is a sadistic blend of cyber wizardry and old-fashioned mechanical torture. A deranged wing nut — Joseph Cross, as Owen Reilly — sets up a Web site with streaming video of an escalating series of murders-in-progress.

He starts with a kitten but quickly escalates to people, and the gimmick is that the various death traps are controlled by the number of viewers who log into the site: The more lookie-loos, the faster the victim dies.