The Definitive Guide to Living in the Capital , Cairo , Egypt

Nicolas Cage plays Kyle, a diamond dealer who, unbeknownst to his wife
Sarah (Kidman) and daughter Avery (Liberato), is broke. His family life isn’t
going too well either. His preoccupation with work is costing him his wife, who
is close to giving up on trying to bridge the gulf between them, and his
daughter who has started smoking and partying.

However, their lives fall apart
when a bunch of thugs burst into their house disguised as police, holding the
family at gunpoint until Kyle agrees to open the safe and give them the
diamonds and cash that they assume the safe is stuffed with. As the night progresses, Kyle refuses to open the safe and we find out that the gang consist of
Elias (Mendelsohn), a drug dealer who owes his supplier over a hundred grand,
his druggie girlfriend Petal (Spiro), his psychopathic brother Jonah (Gigandet)
who used to work in Kyle’s house and has deluded himself into believing that
Sarah is ‘the one’ and Ty (Mihok), one of the supplier’s honchos tagging along
to make sure that the trio don’t make a run for Mexico.

Trespass feels like a five-minute
hostage scene dragged out into a whole film. Due to this, it gets pretty
repetitive: there are only so many times you can hear an ‘open the safe/ I
won’t’ exchange; not to mention the amount of times that the family tells each
other to run for it. Also, being in the same room for the majority of the film gets
pretty tedious. Flashbacks are frequently employed to provide us with some back-story. That being said, while the characters and story are rather clichéd, the film does have a few
twists that aren’t super obvious and will throw you off.          

Cage, Kidman and Liberato spend most of their time sobbing, but Liberato
does have the only funny moment in the film and she pretty much owns it. While
Cage and Kidman are the star power in this film, the thugs are considerably
more interesting.

Trespass doesn’t really have a
clear-cut villain. As the guy in charge of the heist, Mendelsohn plays the most
conflicted person, Elias. He has been presented with an ultimatum;
either he comes up with the money or his girlfriend, his kid’s mother, gets
killed. Out of his desperation, he decides to steal the money from a family that
his brother has told him is obscenely well-off. His intention was to grab the
money and go with no bloodshed; yet things hardly go the way you intend them
to. So in a way, he’s in the same situation as Kyle.

Gigandet’s Jonah is much less palatable. He’s that creep that interprets
a smile as a proposal; yet his sleaze factor is dulled somewhat by his pretty
boy looks and charm. In addition, Jonah doesn’t come off as the obsessed,
mentally unstable psychopath that we’re told he is. In fact, Elias’ junkie
girlfriend Petal appears far more unhinged. For some reason she is entrusted with a gun and with important
tasks despite appearing to reside in some kind of fantasy land.  

An unoriginal thriller with some dodgy acting, Trespass vacates your brain quicker than the time it takes to watch
the trailer, leaving behind a disturbing mental image of Nicholas Cage’s blood-smeared, distractingly puffy face.