Well made, intense and effective, but missed the chance to go deeper

Rating: 7/10 (28 December 2016)

Tense and effective thriller that, interestingly, has more of a horror movie feel, although there is nothing supernatural about the tale. In Detroit, a team of three young people burglarize rich people's houses, It's made possible by Alex, the brains, whose dad works for an alarm company, giving him access to keys and codes. Money is the muscle, a street guy who gets off on the rush of the whole thing as much as the pay-offs, and the girl at the center is Rocky, dreaming of a score big enough to escape from her trailer park existence (and crazy mother) with her toddler kid sister.
The three hear about what should be an easy target. A blind gulf war veteran living alone in an abandoned part of town, who supposedly keeps a $300K cash settlement from his daughter's accidental death in his house. (Stephen Lang is very effective as the blind man). Of course, nothing IS easy, or there would be no film. The movie creates terrific suspense without having to rely to heavily on gore or easy 'cat-suddenly- jumping-out-of-closet' scares. This has echoes of John Carpenter's 'Assault on Precinct 13' and even 'Alien' in it's intelligent use of a strong, claustrophobic main location and interesting character details to produce it's fun-house ride. There are also a couple of very effective visual twists I don't remember seeing before.
On the other hand, while it's a very impressive ride, it's also a limited one. The few deeper themes touched on tend to the broad and obvious. And the film doesn't linger on them much. Which is too bad, since the 'heroes' of the story are three punk kids robbing a blind veteran – who arguably has every right to defend himself. In turn, that would seem fertile territory to raise an interesting 'who's the real villain and why' examination that never comes. Indeed, the moral issues are aggressively avoided by the script turning characters far too neatly into monsters or 'good under it all' archetypes.
A well made, effective enjoyable film, that had a shot of being something even more.