Wednesday Review: Don't Breathe

This movie is okay. Not great, but okay.

I really didn’t expect to be saying that, and after all the hype this movie has been getting from critics I feel a little like the jerk coming in to pee in everyone’s cheerios. I feel almost like heaping praise on Don’t Breathe is expected from a guy who praised The Forest. But, the bottom line is that this movie takes an awesome premise and fails to stick with it.

The premise of the movie, for anyone who missed the ads, is that a group of teenagers break into the house of an elderly blind veteran with a large settlement from the family of the woman who killed his daughter in a car accident. The thieves think that the old man will be an easy target, and plan to leave town with their money. Little do they know, however, that the old man has extensive military training that still makes him deadly without his sight. Once the expendable jerk is gone, the cat-and-mouse game begins. Our heroes have to prevent the man from learning their were additional intruders or, failing that, prevent him from locating them.

Discussing the good: The movie does a good job of making you care about the kind of people who would rob a blind man, by establishing that our main character is truly desperate, our secondary protagonist is trying to help her, and the last one is the expendable jerk they don’t like. Many of the early scenes involving the blind man are also quite well done. It’s fascinating to watch how a man used to experiencing the world without his sight has learned to piece together the information he can gather at a moment’s notice, and it’s done without the kind of superhuman woo we get from Daredevil. He touches something that shouldn’t be there, and is able to grasp it’s significance in a second.

Other critics have noted that the twists in this movie were not really needed, but generally felt that they didn’t completely kill the movie. I, however, feel that the multiple twists did exactly that, breaking with a pattern that was strong enough to sustain a full movie. There were plenty of situations the writers could have presented with just the teenagers dodging the old man to fill up an hour and a half.

In the final act, the plot becomes downright ludicrous. Any tension or suspense created by the realism of the setting is pretty much gone, as we go further and further into wacko silly land. The movie has multiple false endings that serve no purpose except to keep the story going.

My friend James did a YouTube video a while back discussing the problems with Blumhouse movies, and while this isn’t one of theirs, I think it has the same basic problem: It doesn’t feel like it was written as a single story. I get the distinct impression that much of the last act was tacked on to an already written script to make it feature length.

The most obvious example of this is that the Blind Man’s abilities change over the course of the movie. Early on it’s established that he’s good at reacting to his hearing, but his hearing itself is often shown to be no better than that of a normal person. If anything his hearing seems to be going, as he frequently has trouble hearing things from a distance, or hearing one sound over another. Later in the movie, however, a loud noise can easily disable him like he’s a bat.

Also, just an aside: It was slightly over a year ago that TheGift came out. Did someone just decide that every August there should be a horror movie featuring gratuitous rape? This movie isn’t as disturbing as The Gift, but it’s use of rape really feels like it’s there just to shock, not to add to the story.

So, do I recommend this movie? Maybe, but probably not at full price. It’s better than a lot of horror, but it doesn’t live up to the current hype.