Looks like A-X-L won’t be the only sci-fi movie in theaters that’s based on a short film. Kin is based on the 2014 short, Bag Man (you can watch it here) by brothers, Jonathan and Josh Baker, who also direct the film, while screenplay credit goes to Daniel Casey. It follows a young teen, Elijah (Myles Truitt), whose life turns upside down when he finds a strange weapon and ends up on the run with his brother, Jimmy (Jack Reynor), when he some bad people he used to associate with come after him.
The film is an interesting combination of genres. It’s one part social realist drama about two poor brothers, and the struggles they both have to deal with. And it’s also a light Terminator riff, as the weapon Elijah finds is being tracked by two mysterious figures. It’s not necessarily significant since the best sci-fi often contains a very emotionally grounded, human element. The issue is that the sci-fi doesn’t seem to play as deep as it should, so it ends up feeling like it’s interrupting, especially given they never come in contact with the brothers until the climax, so we just get sequences where the film reminds us that – yes, they’re still on the way, just wait a bit longer.
Because this science fiction element barely gets time to breathe, it ends up feeling half-baked. We aren’t given many clues as to what they’re deal is, and why it’s so important for them to get their gun back. Instead, the film saves it all for a sloppy exposition dump that occurs in the climax, but it’s undercut by a very distracting and out-of-nowhere reveal that is so much to take in, that you don’t get the chance to fully process what you just heard. None of it is an inherently terrible idea, but there is a balance that was sorely lacking here.
The dramatic side of the film plays out better. When you see the trailer, which tries to get you hyped with “From the Producer of Stranger Things,” referring to Shawn Levy, it paints a picture of youthful misadventures, but the film is much darker and sleazier than anything you’d see on Stranger Things. But with that, the film is clearly desperate for an R-rating that it can’t seem to have. A man is shot in the throat at one point, which somehow results in not a single drop of blood, and in one scene, Jimmy takes Elijah to the tamest strip club to ever grace the silver screen. It’s not like an R-rating would magically fix everything, but it would feel like a more honest presentation of what the filmmakers are going for.
Despite those problems, Reynor and Truitt work very well together, and they both deliver strong performances. They do something that’s hard to pull off. Since Jimmy was in prison for six years, he and Elijah don’t have the strongest bond, something Jimmy wishes, and they do a good job at pulling off that emotional distance without making it come across like they don’t have chemistry. The rest of the performances are also solid. Dennis Quaid makes the most of limited screen time as Elijah and Jimmy’s father, and James Franco is serviceable as the slimy villain. Zoë Kravitz is a tad underwritten as one of the strippers, who ends up joining Jimmy and Elijah, but she adds some liveliness to the film. The only waste was Carrie Coon, who shows up for maybe less than five minutes of screen time in the climax as an FBI agent, and gets nothing interesting to do.
Kin doesn’t totally work, but at least it tries to tap into something interesting. The interplay between Jimmy and Elijah is very compelling, but their story is constantly at the mercy of a poorly thought out sci-fi plot that doesn’t add anything to the material, and when it finally does, it adds something that feels unnecessary and out of place. It’s all the kind of problems that come with trying to expand a short to feature length, which A-X-L does better, even if it makes more generic choices in order to meet that goal. There are a lot of elements that you can admire here, but they deserve to be in a better movie.