Choices, choices, choices. Making better ones should be an endeavor for all humankind. For now, however, I think I should be a counselor for misguided movie characters. Let’s go over some of the basics, Kin, because you guys made some awfully poor choices here and might need a fresher course. 1) When you owe a bad guy money, never show up with less than the full amount. 2) Never rob from a bad guy. 3) Never claim possession of something a bad guy is going to miss. 4) (And most importantly) Never ever assume anything gets better by visiting a strip club. These seem pretty common sense and yet the Kinfolk violated all of them including #2 more than once.
Let’s start with the kid: new to the teenage world, loner Eli Solinski (Myles Truitt) spends his days ripping copper wiring out of abandoned buildings and selling it for the kind of profit only homemade craft hobbyists know. When dad (Dennis Quaid) finds out, he’s livid … for the “stealing” factor. Really? Are you kidding me here? Your issue is stealing, not safety? The buildings have been abandoned; nobody is missing the wiring. Personally, I wouldn’t want any future owner to trust the existing electronic network of a place where pigeons have roosted for decades, would you? While rooting around a Barbie’s Nightmare House, the kid encounters the remnants of a sci-fi battle inside the skeletal edifice. Hey, look, a metal box! Not exactly sure what the kid expected to encounter from examining what appears to be a carrying case for a flat musical instrument, but it turns out to be a modern ray gun/ion cannon/plasma rifle/phaser/photon torpedo launcher/window treatment. To tell the truth, I’m not sure what it is; what’s important here is the lesson for children everywhere to claim and wield any weapon they encounter.
Fresh from jail, Jimmy Solinski (Jack Reynor) owes the local crime lord (James Franco) $60,000 for jailhouse protection. Ironically, Jimmy ain’t got Jack. This tends to make crime lords angry; I feel like the key difference between crime lords and, say, Sallie Mae, is that crime lords don’t generally offer payment plans – they ought to look into that. Taylor (you named the crime lord “Taylor?”) rejects Jimmy’s good faith gesture of showing up empty-handed and decides to take the money from his dad, who just happens to have $60k hangin’ around in a construction trailer. Oh, don’t worry; it’s perfectly safe … there’s a big padlock on the gate.
Dennis Quaid can’t seem to make it out of Act I these days. I wonder if that’s by appeal or choice.
As someone who owns the name, I really don’t understand why “James” is a butler, a chauffeur, or a secret agent, while “Jimmy” is generally a flunkee or a screw-up. What is up with that?
In short, Jack and Eli and the fancy new ray gun head for Nevada pursued by James Franco in the least madcap buddy road
pic ever. And on the way, there’s a strip club in Colorado for the brothers to alienate an entirely new set of bad guys. Lucky for them, the 14-year-old now owns a mobile cannon because when isn’t that going to come in handy?
After all the sci-fi noise, I swear this film was trying to tell us something about justice and morality. I know; it’s weird, right? We are currently in an unprecedented era of school shootings, but somehow the film where a 14-year-old collects a dangerous weapon, covets it like Frodo covets the one ring and later uses it to cover his idiot older brother from taking beatings in poker halls and strip clubs somehow imagined itself on the correct side of morality. There is the morality of Kin-ship in there, I suppose, and that’s the best part of the film. If Kin had simply managed to focus on that and ignore the impulse to make a sci-fi film, it might have been a winner. But there was too much stupid here to balance the redeemable.
Affection-wise, I expected no smother
But in summation if I had my druther
Saving that fool
From a house of drool
Makes everyone say, “Oh, brother.”
Rated PG-13, 102 Minutes
Director: Jonathan Baker, Josh Baker
Writer: Daniel Casey
Genre: Making bad choices, championship level division
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Kids who dream of fighting E.T.
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: People who slap their foreheads when bad decisions are made
