The worst: Plot focus
Comments: Kin (released 8/31/18) is a movie that has two obstacles to overcome. It doesn't know what type of movie it is and it relies on the last 15 minutes to carry everything. Ultimately, I believe it was successful hurdling one of those two issues and ends up being a fun two hours.
I imagine that if you have an issue with this movie, it will be based around the lack of a cohesive focus to the plot. At different times it tries to be a sci-fi movie, a family drama, a heist movie, a chase movie, a chase movie again but in a different way, a revenge movie, a redemption movie, a road trip movie, an action movie, and a buddy movie. Any good movie will be some of those elements, but they will develop and focus the pieces that it takes. You can take a heist movie theme and combine it into a buddy movie and end up with Ocean's Eleven or you can mix them differently and end up with Entrapment - the mix matters! This movie can't decide what it wants to be and ends up bouncing between themes in a way that felt unsatisfying. Ostensibly this is a sci-fi movie at its core yet sci-fi is present in only sporadic scenes. And much more attention is paid to subplots that the movie could have lived without.
And then we get to the last 15 minutes. Action and sci-fi take over and a huge surprise twist opens up a larger story (that we will probably never see). It is exciting and fun and tries to both clean up some dangling subplots while tying some of the loose plot threads together. It was a fun ending that left me happy enough.
As usual for a review that I write I have not read any reviews or looked at Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes. But I imagine there will be mixed reviews because the viewer has to decide if the payoff in the closing sequence was worth the uneven storytelling it took to get there. For me it was, I imagine for many others it will not be.
Rating: 5.5/10 - Worked for me, but left much to be desired.
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