This is a rough week for new releases, I have to be honest. Between The House With a Clock in Its Walls and Assassination Nation, there wasn’t really much to go off of, in terms of a movie worthy of They Called This a Movie. So, instead, we went back to last week’s limited release of Mandy, starring the Patron Saint of They Called This a Movie: Nicolas Cage.

With Nicolas Cage, we had a lot to choose from, but for this week, we went with Tresspass, a direct-to-video title that has a surprisingly strong cast including Nicole Kidman and Ben Mendelsohn. You’d probably wonder how a movie with a cast like this would wind up without a theatrical release… and then you watch it.

This is not the worst movie we’ve watched for this article series, or for the podcast, but it is annoying as all hell. There’s a lot of screaming, a lot of yelling, a lot of repetition that just makes this movie obnoxious, while also being quite boring. Skip this flick.

The movie centers around Nicolas Cage’s character that deals in diamonds, and quite possibly, in slightly illegitimate terms. He has a wife and a daughter and they all seem to kind of dislike each other. While their daughter sneaks out of the house to a party, a group of criminals forcefully enter the home in order to get what lies in Cage’s safe, which they assume is a fortune of diamonds or, at least, a boatload of cash.

What ensues is a back-and-forth screaming match where Ben Mendelsohn tries to get Nicolas Cage to open the safe, but then Nicolas Cage tries to avoid getting to the point where he has to open the safe. He talks every which way around opening the safe, does some weird Nicolas Cage acting, all the while trying to foil the potential robbers’ plot. There’s also a plot where Cage thinks Kidman’s character cheated on him with a home security installer, whom also happens to be one of the criminals. But maybe they didn’t? But maybe the guy is in love with her, nonetheless. And there’s also Ben Mendelsohn’s girlfriend, whose a drug-addict and probably a liability for a home invasion plot. It’s all kind of a mess of a movie, sort of in the same way the criminal plot is a mess.

What’s crazy about this movie: it was directed by JOEL SCHUMACHER! Now, he’s not exactly Orson Welles or Alfred Hitchcock, but you’d think he’s earned a right to not direct this trash. It’s a home invasion movie where nothing really happens; in fact, the whole point of the movie is our main character trying desperately not to do anything in the movie.

 

OVERALL

This movie is a forgettable trash pile. It’s just kind of annoying and the characters just spend most of the runtime yelling at each other in front of a safe. It was probably pretty cheap to produce, which is good, but I’ve seen worse and better Nicolas Cage movies. This one barely moves the needle one way or the other.