Totally wastes itself from potential greatness

Rating: 3/10 (5 February 2015)

Thought to be safely locked away in their homes, a man and his family find themselves under attack by a gang of criminals seeking them during a legally sanctioned night of depravity, murder and mayhem and forces them to fight back.
This was a really lame suspense/thriller since hardly anything actually happens here until the final ten minutes. Most of this is spent with the family trying to prepare for the actual event and actually watching around the other actions of the night. That it then becomes a frustratingly interminable sequence of events about the family searching throughout the house for the wanted individual makes for a long, boring series of scenes that do nothing but showcase how large and dark the house is without any sense of pacing or tension as it just winds through it's paces until the inevitable conclusion with the house attack. This does make for some fun times with the different brawling and gunfights that take place throughout the living room and kitchen where they come under attack by the criminal gang. All of this is rendered moot, though, under two of the most laughably inept motives behind the film which is the sheer stupidity of the central premise that it rests on and the ineptness of it's execution. The fact that society would devolve so greatly as to await a yearly-appointed time of day when criminal activity would be legally rendered and expunged from their conscious makes no sense at all for it wouldn't be needed in the matter it shows off here for citizens would be wary of further repercussions on that night and would eventually render the need for the particular night moot on the second or third year of it's inception. That this features such a group of whacked-out individuals as these guys shown here who are clearly in it for the legalized murder rewards and have very little that shows them to be normal citizens on every other night of the year completely takes away the scare factor of them who just turn into mindless yackos without much thought. Seemingly this is a commentary on the violence in everyday society but whatever the cause it fails mightily under the inept execution because they never are seen to do anything other than chase the one individual. Rather than partaking in this night of glorious excess, they stand around lamely prancing away on the front-yard because of an ultimatum issued that ruins their credibility when they should've just barged in and taken over the way the plot really should've dictated they do. That might've generated a scary tale here but instead it turns into a lame thriller for an hour with about ten minutes of actual horror and that's not a worthwhile balance.
Rated R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language and children-in-jeopardy.