Survive The Night

Bruce Willis. Remember him? Remember when one of his films coming out was an event. A guaranteed 2 hours of entertainment. The good old days. His films were never guaranteed quality but the good definitely outweighed the bad. Until 2007 when the awful 4th installment of Die Hard signalled the start of a downward trajectory that, Red in 2010 and Looper in 2012 aside, has continued unabated for the last 13 years. Will Survive The Night be the movie to start an uphill trend?

Ha.

Jamie (Shea Buckner) and Matthias (Tyler Jon Olson) are brothers on the run. Behind them, a murder, in front of them, a bag of money and a life in Mexico. An opportunistic robbery during a stop for gas sees a pregnant woman gunned down and Matthias left bleeding out from a gunshot wound to his femoral artery. They need a doctor fast. That turns out to be Rich (Chad Michael Murray), an ER doc in a previous life who's mistake at work left his career in tatters and him and his family with nothing and living back at home with his father Frank (Bruce Willis). Tonight they are all going to find out what they're made of.

Survive The Night isn't the worst film you'll see in 2020 but it's certainly the dullest and most cliched one you'll encounter. There's nothing surprising here, there's nothing new. There's no reason for this film to exist. Watching it you'd wonder what about it attracted Bruce Willis and then you'll remember that Bruce Willis just doesn't care anymore. He'll do anything and he'll do it with the least amount of effort required. The halycon days of Butch Coolidge, Malcolm Crowe & John McClane are over. Now we have Frank. A character who doesn't even merit a surname who adds nothing to the plot apart from existing to add a familiar face to the film poster. His character is supposed to be a hard ass but Willis plays him like a robot. His default setting of late.

Chad Michael Murray shines in comparison. Now I'm not saying he's good but compared to the actor playing his father he comes off like Marlon Brando. At least he's trying and does manage to achieve some sort of redemptive arc despite breaking the Hippocratic oath about a dozen times. Buckner and Olson as the brothers do well but the film strangely tries to make us feel something other than revulsion for the duo and it's a strange choice. It's hard to empathise with a man who shot a mother to be in the head in the first 5 minutes of the film. Jamie in particular flip flops between a weeping willow and a rampaging psychopath. Had director Matt Eskandari taken the character off the fence and let him run wild properly it would have given the last third of the film a lot more impetus, built tension better and made for a more satisfying climax. Instead the whole film just kind of goes out with a whimper.

A whimper that ends with a serene shot that will make you laugh so much that any tiny bit of goodwill created earlier will vanish. A 5 second attempt at depth that's so bad it's all you'll remember in weeks to come. It's the oddest choice in a movie that shows it's audience a flashback of something that happened 10 minutes before in case we didn't remember it.

Survive The Night is out to stream now on google movies and Itunes. A home invasion thriller without any thrills and nothing new to say. Don't bother. It will come to netflix eventually and then you can press play and ignore it as it plays in the background.