When a young teenage boy crosses paths with a futuristic or potentially alien weapon, his boring life becomes an adventurous one that engages with super soldiers, strippers, gun toting criminals, leather clad bar patrons, and a convict brother just released from prison. Throw all that in the mix and you get Kin: an amalgamated genre flick with a nearly disastrous delivery system.
While this new end of summer dumping ground release has a great core story and an amazing score, it struggles with a script that suffers from multiple personality disorder. Never truly deciding if it's a thriller, science fiction, gun play crime thriller, or a road trip movie, Kin is the type of hybrid that either works or doesn't. Sadly enough, at the cost of a great cast, the finished product is a nearly defunct movie that needed a total rewrite at the developmental stage. Instead of focus, we're given a fair to middling effort that could have been absolutely electrifying if they had found a way to stick the landing.
 |
| I'm scared. Scared of this review. |
Using a cast that features Dennis Quaid, Zoe Kravitz, Jack Reynor, James Franco and the youthful new face of Myles Truitt, the film is a dynamic mess that should have been way more controlled. Brothers Jonathan and Josh Baker adapt their short film Bag Man to a full length release that has the heart of brotherhood at its core but fails to ever make hard strides towards letting their audience connect with the characters and their otherworldly plight. The scenes of futuristic soldiers on motorcycles definitely calls back to the '80s aesthetic they're aiming for, but their total failure to make up their minds is rather defeating for the viewer.
As much as I personally enjoyed the context of the relationship between Reynor and Truitt, this is a soulless endeavor that tries to play to our sense of nostalgia. There are some story elements here that definitely work, but the way it's pieced together feels like a puzzle that's falling apart at the seams. From the early previews, I had a sense that something might be amiss but went in with a clear mind. I came out less than satisfied, but more confused than anything else.
The makers of Kin should have abandoned the crime story with all focus on the science fiction end of things. Wait until Netflix or blu-ray for this one. It's watchable but there's a reason they held this for the end of August.
-CG
