Killers Within

Awlful acting by the majority of the cast . The story line showed promise unfortunately became all very predictable with no Twists and nothing new. Don't waste your time.

The actual premise here is a pretty solid foundation for a half-decent film... but it's not a new idea. "Kidnappers/home invaders bite of more than they can chew" seems to have been a bit of a fad post-2010 in various shapes and forms, and delivered at varying levels of quality. This one, sadly, has all of the same tropes that they all have; One overly-aggressive member of the gang ruining everything. One overly-soft member of the gang ruining everything. Multiple overly-stupid and easily manipulated members of the gang ruining everything. The quality of acting really varies. Not just from character to character but from scene to scene. The dialogue in the most part, is about as generic as it comes, and at times painfully corny. Every mistake the kidnappers make is eyerollingly predicable. If you've watched ANY "home invasion with a twist" film that came out in the last 10 years, then this has very little to offer in terms of new ground. With that said, if you want something leave on in the background while you fold laundry or knead bread dough or something, then you could definitely do worse.

Really, I don't want to knock it too bad, but the writing is awful. There's so much of the writing to criticize, but it makes you hate the characters you're supposed to like. There's a lot of typical plot contrivances, pointless exposition to make it seem like there's detail. The 2 'likable' actors in this, they aren't the leads, and their death scenes are horribly written, so even their characters eventually become tragically ruined by the writers. They also exactly copied choreography from better movies action scenes. One to one on parts of the bar fight and final fight plus another couple moves exactly stolen from another movie. I literally watched a compilation of "modern brutal fight scenes" on YouTube and saw these moves before seeing this film. What's worse, is these are all contemporary films for the most part, it's not like they are revitalizing something from 20 years ago, no, just ripping off a couple other better movies. They took a cool concept and screwed it up with just bad bad bad writing. Now, see how much I'm complaining about the writing? Well, it's because I already looked past the special effects and bad acting. It's just eye rolling obnoxious characters not hitting marks with directors ripping stuff off and writers thinking their clever. I honestly feel bad for the cast. Lastly, it's way too long, it's twist was obviously coming, and it was just totally lame. Does the thing where it does a twist and rolls credits to heavy metal... that only works if the twist is fun, unexpected, interesting, or scary... it wasn't. It was a kid we already knew was evil picking up a phone, slowly turning around, and screaming, with no real consequence or weight on the plot. Could have been done better if he was used as more motive for the villain but no. See I thought about turning it off thinking, "Man, when you get more than half way through a bad movie and you figure just may as well finish it.".. then I check and see I'm just half way through the movie and I go "well, I guess that gives it time to do something unexpected." It doesn't, it just sucks throughout the whole thing. Eye rolling through and through. I gave a star for each of the two SOMEWHAT likable characters, I think mostly due to the actors, and an extra star for, idk, the charity of it, maybe the concept. If I took the time to give this a bad review, it's because I'm actually mad about it being disappointing.

So, one aspect, the hostage film, was heading to be okay. Characters were basic but some elements of caring. Then there were the continual stupid choices of the kidnappers, that lowered the focus of the film. Next, the film makers did a horrid job of hiding the twist element to the point that it would have worked better if it was more upfront blatant. Instead, there is this otherworldly element that is squeezed into the film, unsuccessfully for either aspect. And yes, as another review says, "Where's the little boy?"