‘Kin:’ a dull story about a deadly gun that befriends a boy

The movie with a magic gun and a 14-year-old boy who befriends it.

The movie “Kin” stars a new actor named Myles Truitt, who plays Eli. Co-starring with Truitt is Jack Reynor, who portrays Jimmy. The movie is directed by Jonathan and Josh Baker, who have only directed short films. To start, the movie shows an explosion in a building and then it cuts to Eli at school. Dennis Quaid plays Jimmy and Eli’s dad, Hal. The three live in a decrepit part of Detroit. Within the first 10 to 15 minutes of the movie Eli finds the gun that the movie revolves around. Jimmy seems to have fallen into the wrong crowd while he was in jail and had a loan made with criminals on the outside to keep himself safe while on the inside. When Jimmy is released and tells the criminals that he does not have $60,000 to pay them back, the criminals are angered.

Dennis Quaid’s character, Hal, disappears early in the movie and does not return for the remainder of the film. I did not mind him leaving as his character seemed dull. Due to this, Jimmy and Eli take a ‘road trip’ to escape the criminals, but Eli does not know about them and believes they are going on a brother bonding trip. A trip would be nice, but what about when Eli needs to go back to school? I do not think Jimmy thought that far along with his idea. This even comes up during the movie when a character named Milly asks Jimmy if he thinks it is okay to be bring a 14-year-old boy to a strip club.

About half way through, Eli and Jimmy have a stripper tag along. The dancer, played by Zoë Kravitz, is named Milly. The acting by the three main characters, Eli, Jimmy and Milly was okay. For this being Truitt’s first real movie, his acting was not bad, but he did not talk or do much throughout the film other than shoot the gun. I would have liked to see more from him since he was supposed to be the main character and all, but the movie focused on Jimmy and the criminals more.

The movie continues the ‘road trip’ and there is not much that happens for the rest of the movie. The rest of the movie is basically the road trip and the characters running from the criminals. If you watch the trailer, you get the basis of the movie and won’t need to watch it. The criminals seem like an underground gang that take whatever they please. Adding on to this, the leader of the criminals, Taylor, played by James Franco, actually pees in front of a gas station clerk because the clerk would not allow him to use the private bathrooms. This gives the impression that the criminals believe they are above the law.

The next scenes are something I could not see happening in real life, unless the criminals had loads of people and guns, but this is Hollywood. The criminals invade the police station that Jimmy is in and, basically, kill every living person in the station for no reason other than maybe a personal gain. This point ties into what I said earlier about being above the law. This scene shows that the criminals do whatever and don’t care what happens to other people.

Not giving away major details about the movie is difficult with this one as it is repetitive with the scenes and all the action scenes are the same. The movie had nothing funny happen and the dialogue was dull. I did not understand why the movie was titled ‘Kin’ until the very end when certain people show up and gave it away. ‘Kin’ centers around guns, violence and theft for the majority of the movie.

One positive note I will add is that the movie gets right into the reason for the movie being produced, with the gun, but it does not make up for how repetitive the scenes are and how the scenes are basically the same over and over and everything blends together making it a bland movie with similar plot points as “Blank Panther.” Also, most of the scenes are dimly lit, which makes watching the movie difficult to watch. If I were to rate the movie out of 10, I would give it a four. “Kin” was not a well-thought-out movie since the movie does not have much fluff to the plot.