Yesterday, my wife and I went to a couple of locations related to her food blogging activity. At that same location, there was a cinema which showed movies different from the largest Indonesian cinema chain. I was a bit intrigued with one of the movie playing there which was a science fiction type. Since there was a bank promotion for the ticket, I managed to convince my wife to accompany me seeing the film, despite my worry that the movie might not be to her liking. OK, why don't we see what the movie all about now?
Brief Story Line
Story was set in Detroit where a 14 year old boy named Elijah (Myles Truitt) was going around abandoned buildings to scavenge items he thought could be sold to earn some extra money. In one of those places, he saw what seemed to be an aftermath of fights and found an item that looked like a weapon but not a conventional one. It even seemed like from out of this world.
Elijah lived with his adoptive father Hal (Dennis Quaid - The Day After Tomorrow, Vantage Point etc). When his son Jimmy (Jack Reynor - Macbeth, The Man with the Iron Heart etc) returned home after 6 years of prison, Hal was pretty upset and warned Elijah not to be too close with him. It turned out that his suspicion was justified as apparently Jimmy had some problems from his prison time with a violent gang leader name Taylor (James Franco - Why Him?, Rise of the Planet of the Apes etc).
Due to some altercations with Taylor, Jimmy decided to run away from Detroit, bringing Elijah along who also brought that strange weapon. They met with a stripper named Milly (Zoë Kravitz - The Divergent series: Allegiant, Mad Max: Fury Road etc) along the way who joined in their road trip. Hunted by Taylor & his goons and by two persons who were trying to retrieve the strange weapon, these small group had to escape and save their lives.
End of Brief Story Line
Wow, this movie was really boring. It had a duration of around 102 minutes but the really interesting part was only during the last 15-20 minutes. The movie actually started off pretty nicely with the intriguing part on the weapon, its origin and its capability. But unfortunately, the latter scenes were mostly drama. I mean I could understand if it was trying to show some background story of the main characters (which to tell you the truth, quite OK at first). However, when the characters development taking too much time and with the pace of the movie very very slow, it became very boring.
My wife and I were kept wondering when would the movie start to pick up the pace. There were actually parts which were nice enough like the relationship between Elijah and his much older half brother Jimmy and I also thought that the only interesting part in earlier scenes were only the quite impressive newcomer Myles Truitt whom I thought delivered a promising performance. Honestly with two group of people chasing the main characters, the movie should be having a more suspenseful & intense tone. Alas the directors chose to focus on the more dramatic approach.
However, the last 15-20 minutes I mentioned earlier was actually pretty awesome. The action sequence was nicely done. The sound effects especially shooting part were good and special effects were surprisingly quite awesome. It might be due to the quite modest budget of USD 30 million. And just like I suspected, it was a box office bomb making less than one third of its budget. What I did not understand was how the audience did not seem to mind because it had a score of > 50%.
The ending of the movie was actually pretty interesting as it promised something more that could be further explored. I thought it would have been greater had it been a pilot to a TV series as the potential of the story was quite large. Funnily enough, when I read in the internet, people also had the same idea with me about this would be better if it was made into series. The movie was apparently based on a 2014 short movie titled Bag Man (directed by the same people who directed this movie, Jonathan & Josh Baker) which probably explained why it ran out of steam when they tried to make it into a full feature film. Oh there was an interesting brief experience from Michael B. Jordan (Black Panther, Chronicle etc).
Overall I did not had the best time seeing this movie especially the first 80 minutes which felt too draggy but I did enjoy the last 15-20 minutes. Although it did give me an intrigued sense, I was disappointed as well since we would never have the story further explored. It did have the nice part of brotherly relationship and Dennis Quaid did give a convincing performance as a strict loving father, but the rest of the cast were not impressive, especially Zoë Kravitz who played a character that felt like an unnecessary addition. So if you are looking for a good science fiction movie with great suspense, then I suggest you look elsewhere. But if you do not mind having a lot of drama in this kind of movie, then by all means, you could give it a try. The movie still playing in very few theaters in Indonesia.
Mike's movie moments rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
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