Unnessarily over the top.

Rating: 6/10 (16 September 2016)

From director Fede Alvarez comes his second feature film, 'Don't Breathe'. His first being the reboot of 'Evil Dead'. If there's one thing that a horror film can do for a director its shoot them into the limelight. Mainly because they are typically cheap to make and, like this one, don't require a complex narrative. It's more appealing to studio's and audiences eat it up. There has been quite a few gimmicky horror movies this year but this is for sure the best. Unlike those other films, this one looks great. It's easily the most cinematic horror movie I have seen in quite some time. Everything from the direction to the framing, color pallet, and the movement of the camera looked and worked incredibly well.
But the most important question to ask when you see a "horror" movie is, is it scary? While horror and comedy are especially subjective, I think I can easily say that this one just works. It's driven by thick atmosphere. This mainly has to do with both the look and the premise. Now, the story is very simple. Three kids decide to rob an old man after finding out that he has at least $300 thousand stashed in his house.
What they weren't expecting was that he isn't just a docile old blind man. It's a classic story about random people that get in over their heads and are slowly picked off. In fact, it reminded me of the slightly better 2016 film 'Green Room'. It actually follows the same story almost to a T as that film. But instead of the basic home invasion film that we see a whole lot, this one flips it around.
Instead, our main characters are the robbers rather than the people being robbed. The first thirty minutes of this film are nearly perfect. It sets up basic info about our characters, their robbing abilities, and demonstrates the brutality of the man the pick to rob. Not to mention the subtle hint that the old man may just be a victim in all of this. It could not have been a better set up.
Where it starts to falter is when it makes the old guy the villain. If it were to keep him and the main characters as murky human beings, this film would've worked extremely well. It would have transcended the basic us against them film. And it would've become a film where you aren't sure who to root for. But what we got is the two-dimensional horror flick everyone expected.
Even though it kind of turned into an unoriginal horror film, I still had hope. It was still very tense and simple enough to be fun, but it really derails near the middle. Where the villain becomes a B-grade comic book bad guy. With a completely unnecessary plot twist, the film turns this almost relatable old man into an utter psychopath for no reason.
It was from this point on that nearly everything became nonsense. Beforehand almost every scene felt like it belonged in the film. But after that point, almost every scene seemed to end with a question mark. Guns suddenly had infinite ammo until it was convenient not to, the old man suddenly had the magical power of teleportation, and spare keys were randomly hidden away in safes for some reason.
But the biggest issue with the film is that it had no idea when to end. There were two or three times where I swear it was going to end and it just didn't. There was a hilariously out of place and forced moment involving the old man and the main girl that lasted way too long. Then she managed to get out of that situation with the help of another dumb plot twist, then there was some running around, and then it just kind of ended.
It was like twenty minutes of the film but it felt like hours were going by because none of it felt like it belonged. It was really in the last half of the film where things started going off the rails. Everything before hand was very well executed and tense with some beautiful visuals to boot. But the latter portions of this movie just did not work for me. Really nothing felt like it connected to anything because it seemed designed to simply shock. That was it. It didn't want to be a film, it just wanted to shock its audience. But instead of building around that shock it just kind of threw it in there. Even though I respect this film and can give it a passing grade, it's not one I will ever see again.