‘Breaking In’ Puts Gabrielle Union Through a Home-Invasion Wringer

Gabrielle Union is an actress we are are pretty much always rooting for. This has been the case for a long time, and I’m not sure where it started, but it’s definitely true. Her earliest roles had her playing popular girls adjacent to the main characters in She’s All That and 10 Things I Hate About You, but it was likely 2000’s Bring It On, in her role as a rival cheerleader whose squad deserved the trophy, where we all decided we wanted Gabrielle Union to win. It’s a quality she has, one shared by the greatest of rom-com queens and charismatic America’s Sweethearts, from Sandra Bullock to Reese Witherspoon to Jennifer Lawrence. She’s the kind of actress who draws immediate audience empathy and recognition while also able to run through a range of emotions and tribulations.

That Union hasn’t come close to the kind of success enjoyed by the above-listed women isn’t all that hard to explain, unfortunately. The cruddy realities of what kinds of roles are available to black women have meant small-scale successes and big-time disappointments. It’s been the rare movie that’s been able to live up to the level of her talent, but at the very least we can hope that she’s able to star in some movies that will at least let her reap some populist box-office success. Nobody’s going to be confusing Almost Christmas, the 2016 family comedy starring Union, Danny Glover, and Mo’Nique, among others, with Noel Coward, but it’s still nice that it was a modest hit even though it was released mere days after the Trump election.

All of which is to say that even though Breaking In looked every bit like a classic potboiler thriller, with Union taking the lead role of a mother whose children are aggressed by a quartet of home invaders, we all got our hopes way up that it could be a rollicking fun time, where we could all watch a strong woman go from victim to action hero, cheer as the bad guys got theirs, and roll home happy and full of popcorn.

Breaking In sets up like it’s going to do just that. Union plays Shaun, a married mother of two — a teenage girl played by 13 Reasons Why‘s Ajiona Alexus and a pre-teen boy played by Seth Carr — who heads out to her late father’s estate to settle things and prepare it for sale. We learn that her relationship with her father was strained-to-nonexistent and that he had a criminal past. Which probably has something to do with the opening scene of the film, where an older black man is run down in the street while jogging and killed by the driver. So probably bad things are about to happen. Another clue is when Shaun and the kids discover the house — located in a remote, wooded area, natch — is heavily fortified. As if expecting to be attacked.

There’s more than a whiff of Panic Room to the setup here, with the parent-child bond set up against a gaggle of in-fighting home invaders. They want money, Mom wants to keep the kids safe. It’s enough to make you weep that Union wasn’t able to have starred in Panic Room herself, with all of David Fincher’s stylish direction. Breaking In is a far cry from that. When the burglars do strike, lead by Twilight dad Billy Burke and including American Crime star Richard Cabral as the especially brutal one (the Dwight Yoakam! Okay, I’ll shut up about Panic Room now), they strike with blunt force and brutality, locking the kids indoors and leaving Union helpless outdoors. Of course, she’s not helpless. She captures one of the burglars and begins a series of tense stand-offs with Burke, negotiating for her children’s safety with a man she knows will likely try to kill them all.

After I got done pining for Panic Room, I got to thinking about another movie I wished Breaking In was: Jennifer Lopez’s Enough, where Lopez played a battered wife who runs away with her child and then devises an elaborate plan to train in the deadly arts and then lure her husband into a confrontation where she can kill him. In both cases, the real-life danger that women experience at the hands of men (in their own homes, no less) is placed into heightened circumstances. What Enough and Panic Room do that Breaking In does not is offer the viewer a rollercoaster ride on top of the brutal reality of violence. Panic Room does so with visual style and atmosphere; Enough does so by becoming, essentially, Home Alone for battered women. Breaking In does neither, and thus we’re only left with the brutality. The kids don’t really do much but cower together. Union alternates from slicing up bad guys to running for her life. There’s little in the way of cleverness to James McTeigue’s direction, which is a bit surprising coming from the guy who gave us V for Vendetta (though that film felt the heavy influence on the Wachowskis, under whom McTeigue had worked as a second-unit director on the Matrix films.

There’s no spoiling a movie like Breaking In but there’s also no point in digging into the plot. The kids are in danger. Then more danger. Then her husband shows up to get Dick-Halloran’d by the criminals. Union gets to take a few cool postures and some dialogue that reminds you that A Mother’s Love Is Fierce and Primal. But for the most part, Breaking In is a star vehicle that, for Union’s sake if nothing else, you wish could zoom by a little faster.

Where to stream Breaking In