What exactly is Kin trying to be? Even after watching it all, I’m not really sure what directors Jonathan Baker and Josh Baker were going for in adapting their 2014 short film Bag Man into a feature-length motion picture. Kin as a movie is a jumbled mess that’s trying to do a whole lot of stuff but mostly comes off as just an awkward hybrid of Laserblast and Good Time, two movies I’m pretty sure nobody would ever think to put together in any other context. Sometimes pairing up two widely disparate elements works like a charm and other times it just results in a mess and the latter end result is what’s happened with Kin.
Eli (Myles Truitt), a troubled 14-year-old, is the lead character of Kin and much like the protagonist of Laserblast, he’s an everyday teen who happens to discover a powerful alien weapon, that, unbeknownst to said everyday teen protagonist, is being tracked down by two aliens (sadly, the aliens in Kin are not adorable stop-motion turtle-creatures). At the same time, Eli’s brother, Jimmy (Jack Reynor), just got out of prison and he isn’t out of the slammer for more than a few hours before he realizes he owes a lot of money to local gangster Taylor (James Franco). Needing to get away from Taylor, Jimmy takes his estranged brother Eli with him on an impromptu cross-country road trip that eventually utilizes that alien weapon Eli’s been lugging around.
It sure does take a while for Kin to remember it’s got an alien gun lying around though, that seemingly critical plot element gets completely forgotten about for massive stretches of the story. The alien gun takes a backseat to Eli and Jimmy traveling across state lines and bonding along the way in a toxic brother relationship straight out of last year’s excellent motion picture Good Time. Whereas Good Time was very much conscious of how damaging that type of relationship can be, Kin instead decides that Jimmy’s selfish criminal behavior that constantly puts his brother in danger is prime fodder for the weirdest possible schmaltzy brother bonding sequences, including one where Jimmy takes Eli into a strip club.
As you can imagine, this is such an odd sequence that’s also intended to be a crucial point in the story where these two characters begin to really connect with one another. That’s impossible to do though when it’s clear that Jimmy is not a person Eli should be around and both characters aren’t all that interestingly written as individuals. After numerous generic road trip scenes, the alien gun finally comes back into play like a bolt from the blue only for it to be solely utilized so that Jimmy can coerce Eli into robbing a strip club owner. There are so many instances of heightened genre elements perfectly complimenting more realistic human drama in movies (Get Out and A Quiet Place are two perfect examples of this merger happening seamlessly) but Kin isn’t one of them, it’s never able to make a crime drama about two brothers on the lam and anything involving the alien gun merge cohsievely.
This is mostly because both of those elements are so dismally handled when they’re just on their own, particularly the relationship between Eli and Jimmy that’s supposed to serve as the crux of the whole endeavor, especially in the home stretch of the story. Making such a poorly executed sibling dynamic so crucial to its overall story was a bad idea on the part of screenwriter Daniel Casey and the uninteresting characters scattered through his script leave the cast of Kin with nothing to do. Poor Jack Reynor can never get properly utilized in American cinema it seems, this talented actor is stuck with a boring character who isn’t even a quarter as interesting as the criminal slimeball he played in Free Fire. Now there was a role with the kind of energy and personality the characters of Kin are sorely lacking in.
The worst of the cast members has to be James Franco though in one of his worst on-screen performances as our main bad guy, Taylor. It’d be impressive how Franco manages to make the part of a Detroit gangster who pee’s wherever he pleases in gas stations so thoroughly forgettable if his work here wasn’t also incredibly and gratingly boring. So much of Kin is dedicated to just reminding us that his character is still out there hunting down Jimmy as a way of creating tension, but Franco is so listless in the part that Taylor never becomes a credible threat. He’s just another aspect of Kin that feels both confusingly executed and forgettable. Worst of all, I don’t think any one of its numerous characters were ready for some football!