Trespass


Director: Joel Schumacher (2011)
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Nicole Kidman, Cam Gigandet
Find it: IMDB

Nicolas Cage gets a lot of stick for his bizarre performances in odd movies. Lately he's become more of an Internet meme than an actor. However, shut up. Nicolas Cage is, frankly, awesome - and never more so than when doing an Adam West impression in a superhero film, screaming about bees or forcibly putting bunnies back in boxes. Besides, if Trespass is the result of Nic Cage playing it 'straight', well, long live Crazy Cage.


Diamond broker Kyle Miller (Cage) lives in a lovely house with his lovely wife (Kidman) and daughter (Liana Liberato). Their bourgeois paradise is shattered when four masked killers break in, demanding that Kyle opens his massive safe and shares out the diamonds and cash within. Seemingly having watched Ransom recently, Kyle tells the crooks to go swivel.

Aside from his wearing glasses and having reasonably stupid hair, this might be Cage's straightest performance yet. It makes for distracting viewing, expecting him to break out some characteristic craziness - which he never does. Nicole Kidman is reliably strong as Sarah, but fails to escape the orbit of an archetypal 'terrified wife' role. The crooks are as dull and uninteresting, with Cam Gigandet playing a character that seems developmentally delayed but apparently isn't. The plot, cribbed from Hostage and a number of other home invasion movies offers nothing new or innovative, aside from the novelty of seeing Nic Cage play a character who doesn't do anything remotely interesting.

It's not a particularly bad movie - the action works well and the actors' performances are strong - but neither is it a very good one. By the standards of its director and lead actor, its bizarre how straight it is.


Trespass is a workmanlike action film that ticks all the right home invasion boxes but fails to fill in any of the 'use a separate sheet if necessary' sections. It's utterly unmemorable, which, from the likes of Joel Schumacher and Nic Cage, is quite odd in itself.

2 comments:

  1. After Ghost Rider 2, I stopped watching Cage-movies, so I guess I'll never ever see this :)

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  2. This was a tough sit...as a life-long Cage fan, i know he can do better than Trespass. He should make more movies like Drive Angry.

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