Kin

Kin. Jonathan & Josh Baker. 2018.

So what’s this then? I basically buy anything that’s sci-fi, so I’m guessing that this is… that?

This is apparently based on a short movie, and I thought that this had to be a low budget movie. But imdb says that it had a $30M budged (at bombed, hard, at the box office). So perhaps there’s some fun stuff coming, because the start is rather dreary.

I think I kind of see what the directors are going for: Mixing gritty drama (ex-cons, loan sharks, etc) with family drama with sci-fi and hoping that something interesting will come out of it. That doesn’t happen. The actors are flailing, getting all their chops from watching reruns of The Sopranos. Everything has been colour-graded into grey and beige. The script has a humour bypass.

I laughed out loud at the “character development” scene in the middle of the movie. Instead of the protagonist going “you’re not my father; you were never there for me when I grew up” (which is the standard phrase to develop character in these movies), instead he said “me and dad… we were never there for each other”. (The father’s dead at this point OOPS SPOILERS you see, so they had to phrase it that way.)

That almost made me like this study in tedium, but no.

WHAT DID THEY USE THE $30M ON! I’m guessing 29.9M went to James Franco hamming his way through his impression of Fort Apache, The Bronx. I guess it’s nice that somebody had fun.