I was actually looking forward to this. It looked like a promising remake of sorts from Audrey Hepburn's Wait Until Dark it had my antenna up. Unfortunately, the fact that the movie is advertising that it was made by the makers of The Evil Dead (not a bad movie, mind you), should have been my first clue was that all was not what it would seem.
The movie takes place in Detroit, and we are introduced to our main three characters, (two men, one woman) in the process of breaking into, and stealing valuables from some rich person's house. The movie then makes a point to show that one is a true jerk, and the other two thieves are good, conscionable people merely thrown into their life of crime by economic circumstances and they are trying to get out. The avenue out comes in the form of a blind veteran who recently won a settlement after his only daughter was hit and killed in a drunk driving accident. He is in an economically depressed neighborhood that is literally devoid of any life besides him. They decide to rob him and leave for California. But it turns out that once the robbery starts and he awakens, things go south for out merry bunch of thieves as it turns out they drastically underestimated him.
This, from the premise, looked like it was going to be a great cat-and-mouse story where the thieves realized they bit off more than they could chew. I thought it would be similar to Wait Until Dark where Audrie Hepburn plays a blind woman who is in a similar situation with some home invaders. Alas, it was not meant to be. In an effort to be edgy or proletarian-sympathetic, we are asked to empathize with the thieves and not the victim, sort of a reverse on Dirty Harry or Death Wish. The movie goes out of its way to give the woman a backstory of a horrible, abusive in all aspects childhood and a being single mother herself, doing only what she has to for her beautiful little daughter; saving her from poverty and the vaguely insidious peccadilloes of her deadbeat, white-trash family. One of the men is in unrequited love with her and works in an alarm company. He is the trio's way in to enter the houses by stealing their security codes . He is tortured over the robberies, and is curiously well-informed of the letter of the law (our captain exposition for later). The third, the woman's lover, is just an amoral bastard through and through, who treats her bad and belittles the other man. Of course, he gets killed right away. But in a frankly sickening twist, the blind man must be made even more morally reprehensible than the home-invading thieves. I won't be a plot spoiler and reveal the secret, but the movie veers wildly away from an interesting thriller to become straight-up exploitation. Those of you unfamiliar with the exploitation genre and what that entails, think of movies like Hostel, The Human Centipede, I Spit On Your Grave, Last House On The Left, Cannibal Holocaust, and A Serbian Film to name a few.
Since I wasn't expecting an exploitation film, this really turned my stomach. Exploitation films have their place, but you have to warn people first. Don't Beathe started out with an interesting premise and looked to be pretty good. And for the first half of the film, it is fairly well realized. There is some great suspense. The issue I had was that we are to feel sorry for criminals who break into people's houses to rob them. When I was watching the first half, I was waiting to see if they would get their just desserts, and when the filmmakers make the blind man a twisted creature worse than the thieves, I found myself wishing the whole house would just burn down around all of them. I think I'm supposed to root for the thieves because of their situation, but I can't. And then the movie throws you the exploitation curve, in effect punishing you for rooting for the blind robbery victim by making him into a monster. The movie's moral relativism ruined what would otherwise have been a pretty good hoot. It is not, strictly speaking, a bad movie. It sets up some very familiar tropes of a good thriller and pulls them off successfully. You will not see anything new that you haven't seen before, but it is mildly entertaining.
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