While She was Out

WHILE SHE WAS OUT (2008) - June 6, 2009
Starring Kim Basinger as a seemingly meek housewife who fights back against a group of goons after they terrorize her on Christmas Eve, this was a surprisingly bad film. Surprisingly because the film has a decent enough concept, and because it was executive produced by Guillermo Del Toro. I can't imagine what he saw in this movie. Featuring some embarrassingly clunky dialogue, this was definitely one of the most badly written films I've seen in a while (and I just saw Pathology). It takes way too long to get going, and once it does it just isn't all that compelling; the bad guys are atrociously written and never come off as being even the least bit threatening, so there's pretty much no suspense. Some of the deaths are reasonably violent, but all the characters are so underwritten that it's hard to feel anything but apathy when they get killed off -- certainly, there's not that feeling of bad guys getting their comeuppance that you'd expect out of a film like this. Kim Basinger was fine, but all the other performances were uniformly terrible. Even the usually reliable Lukas Haas was awful, though to his credit I don't think a good performance would have even been possible given the material he had to work with. This was pretty much an all-around failure. *1/2