‘Trespass” is about desperate hours, a hostage situation, the panicked eyes of the abused glancing at the door and wondering whether to make a run for it. All of this was also happening on the screen, but those idiots deserved it. Why me? I wished a bottle would roll by so I could stick an S.O.S. in it.
Nicolas Cage re-enacts his career arc in 90 grueling minutes. He begins as a dork, morphs improbably into an action hero and by the end is knocked flat as a layer of pool algae — and twice as useless. He’s a diamond dealer with a beautiful wife (Nicole Kidman, who is a dismal waste of talent here) and a headstrong teen daughter (Liana Liberato).
Five years ago, every TV show and movie had to have someone named Jake. This fall, disturbingly, it’s Kyle (see also: “Dolphin Tale” and “50/50”). Even to me it’s starting to sound like a toolish name.
This Kyle (Cage) is so dumb that, despite being a gem merchant who keeps huge amounts of cash in the house, he allows a crew of home-invasion lads to enter his house after one robber pretending to be a sheriff on a random, unannounced visit approaches his security gate, conceals his face and asks how many people are present. Nothing suspicious there!
The burglars (including a nutty girl they bring along who spends the movie trying on the Kidman character’s clothes) proceed to point guns at everybody, inquire as to the whereabouts of the valuables, re-point their guns, cock them, scream a bit, renew their request for information about the money, make clear that this time they really mean it, re-point, re-cock, repeat, repeat, repeat. Kyle stalls, yet the burglars mainly respond to his lies by … pointing guns and screaming some more. Why not try some old-fashioned torture? Any moviegoer who has sat through Cage’s “Ghost Rider,” “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” or “Season of the Witch” could furnish plenty of creative suggestions.
The thieves, who at the beginning aver that they must be out in 15 minutes (cut, repeatedly, to the countdown on a stopwatch, which turns out to be meaningless), instead start chatting about their ugly childhoods, discuss their drunk-mama issues, smoke, flirt with the missus, swear, fight with each other and do drugs. It’s like being invaded by “The Jerry Springer Show.” At all times they behave very like characters trying to pad out 90 pages of screenplay rather than desperadoes out for loot.
Cage and director Joel Schumacher, who has fallen so far from the A-list that he provokes a demand for new letters of the alphabet after Z, have each found their cinematic soulmates. Plodding forth with ever more insistent vulgarity and cliché, they are impervious to irony. Cage gets to mutter the line, “I’m worth more dead than alive” — Really? More than zero? — and Schumacher seems unaware of how much giggling he is inviting from the audience when he allows one baddie to say, “Look around you. Could this be any more f – – ked up?”