FILM

USA 2011 91 mins Dir: Joel Schumacher Starring: Nicolas Cage, Nicole Kidman, Cam Gigandet, Ben Mendelsohn, Liana Liberato

After a couple of films that sank without trace ('Blood Creek') or weren't even released in the UK ('Twelve'), Joel Schumacher returns to the single location thriller territory of 'Phone Booth' with this 80s-style yuppie home invasion flick. Alas, most of the advance publicity hinged on star Nic Cage's disruption of filming when he announced that he wanted to switch roles from good guy to bad guy. The main problem, however, is the increasingly preposterous contrivance required to sustain the premise for 90 minutes. This despite the fact that Schumacher attempts to distract our attention with flashbacks, a new twist every 10 minutes, and an awful lot of shouting. That said, Cage is particularly good at shouting and seems to have accommodated his artistic vision by playing a good guy with a bad guy streak.

The B-movie set-up casts Cage as a workaholic diamond dealer, Nicole Kidman as his neglected spouse and Liana Liberato as their rebellious teen daughter. Since the family resides in a mansion protected by an ultra-high-tech security system, the masked, gun-wielding bad guys simply bluff their way in by pretending to be cops. They seem unusually well-informed and have designs on the contents of Nic's hidden safe. To complicate matters further, Nicole recognises the youngest villain (Gigandet), with whom some illicit hanky-panky may have occurred. As the clock ticks down towards the arbitrary deadline the robbers have set themselves, daft backstories and shoals of red herring emerge, while members of the family fail to flee when given ample opportunity to do so. Still, it's almost worth seeing for the moment when slumming Oscar-winner Nicolas Cage bellows at fellow slumming Oscar-winner Nicole Kidman: "Your filthy lust invited them in!" (Robin Askew)

Website www.trespass-the-movie.com/

Opens November 11