Overview
A young boy finds a powerful otherworldly weapon, which he uses to save his older adoptive brother from a crew of thugs. Before long, the two of them are also pursued by federal agents and mysterious mercenaries aiming to reclaim their asset.
The movie is titled Kin, so let’s meet the family: single dad Hal Solinsky (Dennis Quaid) is not particularly close to his two sons, 14-year old Eli (Myles Truitt) and 21-year old Jimmy (Jack Reynor), but is trying to provide a moral compass to them. Since Jimmy spent the last six years of Eli’s childhood behind bars, the two brothers aren’t all that close either. When Eli is out stealing copper wire to make some money, he finds some sort of futuristic weapon in a derelict factory filled with the bodies of dead soldiers. When he activates the weapon, it, unbeknownst to Eli, seems to act as a homing beacon for more futuristic soldiers to track him down.
Jimmy may be out of prison now, but he still owes drug dealer Taylor Balik (James Franco) some $60k, and the easiest way to get his hands on this kind of money is for Jimmy to take Taylor along to rob the safe in his father’s office. When Hal stumbles in on them Taylor kills him, but in the fight Taylor’s brother also dies and he is out for revenge. As Jimmy now needs to get out of town, he brings Eli along under false pretenses and they end up on a road trip of sorts, for some reason picking up a stripper Milly (Zoë Kravitz) along the way. On their road trip they encounter various bad guys sent by Taylor, and Eli’s mysterious weapons comes in handy to get them out of these situations, but in the meantime the futuristic soldiers are closing in on them…
The problem with this movie is that it is a bit of this and a bit of that, but not much of anything. There is little to the family bonding angle of the two brothers. Jimmy is definitely not a role model for Eli to look up to, and he also shows only marginal character development during the story. Oh and why is Milly there with them you ask? Indeed.
There also is very little to the ‘sci-fi’ angle of the space gun – actually for all but the ending it could have been any kind of weapon without changing the story – its special origins only become relevant at the very very end. The saddest part is that the finale is still the most interesting part of this movie. It’s as if you have been watching an hour and a half of backstory to get to where the good bit finally starts. But since the ending has pretty much nothing to do with the entire film up to then, it is not a great twist, it is just a silly teaser for a sequel that will never be.
★★☆☆☆
