Survive the Night

Bruce, are you bored or something? Got a huge debt? Why do you keep showing up in these seriously bad movies with scripts as if they were written in the late 80ies or early 90ies? You have been in so many good movies, it's weird that I no longer can take it for granted that it's a quality film if your name is on it.

This cleverly conceived thriller is about a doctor and his family trapped inside a farm by two criminals. The film is well-paced and the camera work is slick. Bruce has a surprising larger role then I expected as the grandfatherly patriarch and he's effective enough to keep be engrossed. The rest of cast are admirable. With the stand out being, Shae Buckner who plays a unhinged but sympathetic criminal and does well to add layers to the role. The single location setting is brought to the fore here by expert claustrophobic direction. The violence is intense, sometimes graphic but never over the top, and completely tense. It's not a big blow 'em up adventure story, it's just as dark, gritty, and realistic, in which things never go according to plan and innocent people always get hurt. Unfortunately, after an engrossing game of cat and mouse, the conclusion is somewhat weak. Staple clichés crop up and the film goes for a crowd-pleasing finale that doesn't quite feel right. Still watchable though and a recommended stream.

Don't watch this. Waste of my time and such a bad movie.

There were more plot holes than the unnecessarily long and sappy 90 minute cat and mouse runtime smh. I get that this is amateur writer Doug Wolfe's first ever writing credit, but c'mon, didn't anyone else proofread this ridiculous long dragged out mess? Here's the math: of the 90 min runtime, subtract 7 mins for opening and post credits. Then we have 20 mins of some bad guys involved in, what, I don't know, that also pull off a stupid stunt, as well as the Brady Bunch family, where the son is a failure, for, I don't know what. The remaining 60+ minutes is the most ridiculous and illogical plot-riddled to the point of hilariousness cat-and-mouse game, with dragged out long and useless scenes. Add the soap-opera sappy dialogue between two brothers, and the father and son trying to rekindle their relationship - amidst the so called terror. Escape, come back, hide, get caught, repeat. And even for criminals, the stupidity in their actions were laughable. It got annoying very fast. Had this film been a 20 min short, it may have received a 5 or 6 from me. Bruce Willis was his usual "look at me I'm Bruce Willis" attitude with his stale monotonic washed-up tough-guy demeanor. But that I expected going into this, because anything worse than a Bruce Willis film, is another Bruce Willis film. Even the pretty Lydia Hull, who oddly is in almost every Willis film, was boring and stale. The rest of the cast were ok, with the bad guys being the most convincing, and made the effort to act. I'm sure failure from the director to direct his cast properly was a big part of the rest of the characters' failed acting. The directing was also sub-par with some terrible editing. For a b-grade film, the score wasn't as annoying as I'd expected it to be, but still somewhat overbearing and unfitting. The cinematography was ok, but bad in the night outdoor scenes. If you watch this film at 5x faster speed, even without hearing any dialogue, you'll get the gist of the entire story, which is nothing new and done many times before. Sadly, it's a generous 3/10 from me, and I will never get my 90 minutes back.