![]() ![]() ![]() Loughery doesn’t try quite so hard to embed anything as interesting here, but there’s a light throughline about challenged masculinity with a gun-toting “alpha” threatening a gun-averse “beta”, even if it’s slightly squandered in the finale, one that directly cribs from Sleeping with the Enemy.īut then that’s sort of the point of these films anyway, patch-working elements from the thrillers that wrote the rules back in the late 80s and early 90s and seeing if they still work. It was similarly structured stuff but there was also an intriguingly insidious racial element with Jackson’s bitter cop infuriated that an interracial couple was living next door. Screenwriter David Loughery also worked with Neil LaBute on the first Screen Gems domestic thriller, 2008’s underrated Lakeview Terrace, which saw Samuel L Jackson terrorise Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington. Leering, sneering, crawling and groping his way through the film, it’s the kind of fearless yet measured performance that only really comes from an actor this late in his career, his vast experience providing him with both the courage to go big and the discipline to rein it in.ĭennis Quaid in The Intruder. He’s allowed some wild excesses, which, as mentioned, have been in short supply in these films of late, with one particular moment of frenzied licking causing vocal audience revulsion. But the film really belongs to Quaid, having enviable amounts of gonzo fun as the unhinged antagonist, dialling the menace up high when needed without going full ham by the end. Good is likable, if stuck with an increasingly infuriating naive wife role, while Ealy fares better as the good guy than he did playing the villain, to unconvincing effect, in The Perfect Guy. The pace is well modulated by director Deon Taylor (who was behind last year’s scrappy exploitation pic Traffik), the escalation of events is involving and tense and the central trio develops a strong, uneasy dynamic. But as the cogs speed up, something relatively miraculous happens: it actually starts to work. The “business” chat is hilariously vague (“I knew you’d close the deal!” “You’re the number one earner in the company!”) as is Annie’s job (she writes about “injustice and empowerment for women’s magazines” yet we never see her type a single word). There’s an unavoidable stench of familiarity wafting through The Intruder, most pungent in the early stretch as some rather drab, perfunctory dialogue takes us through scenes we know all too well. But as they soon discover, Charlie isn’t quite ready to move out. The pair discover an extravagant, secluded house that Annie immediately falls in love with and after agreeing on a deal with the owner Charlie (Dennis Quaid), they move in. After closing a “big deal”, Scott (Michael Ealy) finally agrees with his wife Annie (Meagan Good) that a move to the countryside might be for the best. Which makes the release of The Intruder, yet another glossy PG-13 melodrama from Screen Gems about a black couple tormented by an exterior evil, feel like an unexciting prospect, its beats easy to predict from a quick glance of its synopsis and its entertainment level easy to predict from the dross that’s come before. With limiting PG-13 ratings and scripts that have failed to recognise the streak of perversity that made the originals so much fun, they have often resembled cheap TV remakes, each as anonymous as the other. But while they might have represented a step forward for diversity, the same can’t be said for quality, and rather than add anything new to tried and tired subgenre tropes, they have felt lazily recycled and, even worse, horribly sanitised. ![]()
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