This one is generally well made and on paper there's a good deal of promise. A fairly standard home invasion/Die Hard-lite scenario, except that the "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker" character is 12.
The things that are wrong with this movie are just bad enough to spoil it however.
1) Kevin James as the systematically-subtracted motherfuckers' ringleader, a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. Think Paul Blart with a swastika tattoed on the back of his head. Right.
2) The baddies are Nazis, so the script could have had an overt and quite nasty racist theme to it and sure enough someone decided to cast an African Canadian woman and child as key members of the home being invaded, yet in truth their (white) saviour is almost as mean to them as the SS mall cop.
Plus the child is possibly the most superfluous character in a movie that I have come across in years. So, a bit of awkwardness is generated, but nothing much else.
3) There is some fairly unnecessary lethal violence involving dogs...and children, but the latter is not shown, only suggested.
4) The Brotherhood are after a key that Becky has stashed away in her tree house. And, spoiler alert, we never get to know what it opens, thus the stakes are significantly muddied. This would be like Hans Gruber banging away at a safe unsuccessfully for the entirety of Die Hard and then plunging to his death without us ever learning of its contents.
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