One assumes that handsome paydays for all and possibly some sort of foreign tax shelter were the reasons for the birthing of Trespass, a massively retarded home invasion thriller directed by Joel Schumacher and starring Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman that otherwise exhibits no particular reason for existing.



Cage plays Kyle Miller, an unfashionably bespectacled diamond dealer whose wall-safe password is “diamond.” He lives in a well-appointed home in a gated community, with his wife Sarah (Kidman) and teenage daughter, Avery (Liana Liberato). On the surface everything is good, but there are ripples of marital and familial discord. These mere pebbles in the pond are put in perspective, however, when a group of thugs (Ben Mendelsohn, Cam Gigandet, Jordana Spiro and Dash Mihok) gain entry to his house posing as cops. They demand that he give them diamonds and cash. He refuses, but when Avery — who has snuck out to a party — returns home, Kyle loses the upper hand, and finds he and his family locked in a struggle of wills with these brutish interlopers. As their focus and allegiance to one another begins to crack, can Kyle exploit these problems to save his family?

Writer Karl Gajdusek, whose screen credits include The Mechanic and Unknown, also has many playwriting credits to his name, which is rather baffling given the many narrative set-ups that come to no greater fruition within Trespass. There are a couple smart physical details (the would-be burglars have tape affixed to the pads of their fingers), but the film cycles through so many ridiculous stories and motivations pegged to the criminals’ intent as to court outright boredom. And the dialogue that Gajdusek gives them invariably sounds pedantic or awkward coming out of their mouths (“Every minute we stay past the first 20 minutes ups our risk of being caught by 10 percent!”), as if cobbled together from a bunch of different newspaper articles about similar domestic robberies.

The idea of madly inept and/or fucked up intruders could be plumbed to delicious, ironic and/or subversive effect, but Trespass is played bewilderingly straight, even with Cage’s tinny, warbled accent flickering in and out. The performances seem to exist on different emotional planes, giving the film an uneven feeling, but the most damning thing about the movie is the fact that it so consistently introduces little plot twists and turns that portend intriguing wrinkles which never arrive. The result engenders a cyclical response through the stages of grief — first confusion, then denial, and finally anger. Trespass is fascinating, all right, but for none of the wrong reasons. (Millennium Entertainment, R, 90 minutes)