Breaking In is a 2018 action thriller directed by James McTeigue, written by Ryan Engle, and starring Gabrielle Union as Shaun Russell, who also served as a producer on the film. Billy Burke plays Eddie, the leader of a four-man crew, with Richard Cabral, Levi Meaden and Mark Furze as his accomplices, and Ajiona Alexus and Seth Carr as Shaun's children. Running a lean 88 minutes with credits, it was made for twelve million dollars and grossed over fifty-one million worldwide, so on a commercial level it did exactly what it needed to do.

The premise is straightforward. Following her father's murder, Shaun travels with her two children to his remote, heavily secured childhood home in order to settle his estate and sell the property. Waiting inside are four criminals searching for a safe containing four million dollars. They take her children hostage, Shaun finds herself locked outside, and the film becomes a fight to get back in.

I want to start with the title, because it caused me genuine confusion for a good stretch of the film and then turned into the most interesting thing about it. Going in, I assumed this would be a family defending their home against intruders. That is what the words suggested. Instead, the criminals are already inside from the outset, and the person doing the breaking in is Shaun herself, forced to penetrate her own family's fortress to reach her children. It is a neat inversion, and I appreciated it once it clicked. It is also faintly deflating to realise the title is doing more clever work than the ninety minutes attached to it.

Because the fundamental problem with Breaking In is that it has no identity of its own. You can feel it searching, trying on the clothes of better films, never settling into anything distinctive. Home invasion thriller, revenge picture, single-location siege movie, maternal action vehicle: it gestures at all of them and commits to none. At some point somebody needs to put up missing posters, because it never located what it was supposed to be. The wider critical reaction landed in the same place, with the consensus pointing to thinly sketched characters and a slapdash plot, and Variety memorably describing it as a work of profound half-assedness that struggles to stretch its premise even to the ninety-minute mark.

Gabrielle Union is the film's genuine asset and she works hard for it. She sells the fear, the desperation, and the escalating resolve without ever being handed a "here is why this woman is capable" scene to lean on. She simply plays a smart person under extreme pressure, and it works. Given she also produced the film, her commitment to the material is understandable, and she deserves far better than what surrounds her.