This Year in PG-13 Dystopia
The stories we’re aiming at kids reflect our own fears.
Note: Readers should beware of a frank scene involving sexual harassment and also spoilers for a group of films you might end up hearing from the other room when your 13-year-old has a slumber party.
I think those of us who have kids, or are regularly trusted with the care of kids, try to get them into the stuff we’re into, and that this is sometimes harmless and fun and sometimes a bit self-serving. I remember my father sitting me down for all sorts of movies or books that were a step or two above my film literacy when I was young, purely because he hoped I would become just as obsessed with them as he was. This worked well in the case of Blade Runner (and not so well in the case of Hemingway). Some of this year’s pricey PG-13 duds seem to me to be in a different spirit: One that thinks kids can’t possibly fail to like them because they’re trying to check every box on the checklist of what people think kids are stressing about.
Kin Squanders Its Promise
Kin is a movie where stealing to survive is a fact of life, where authority figures are gunned down by the anarchic and violent, where one adult bleeds out on the floor and then instructs a kid to “stay down” amidst a mass shooting. It doesn’t bother explaining the central conceit around its Maguffin—an impossibly powerful energy rifle that seems to enjoy an unlimited ammo cheat code—even at the very end, where it’s half-answered in a way that is somehow more confusing and less useful to the premise of the film than if no attempt had been made to answer it at all. A producing effort of Michael B. Jordan, who makes a brief appearance at the end, it is a sadly wasted opportunity.
Set in the blasted-out post-industrial remains of some city that might be Detroit or Gary, Indiana, Kin is telling a story of desperation, of broken families, and of the inescapable bad decisions facing people who have no options in a country that doesn’t care about them. Or it’s trying to. A young boy, Eli (Myles Pruitt, who acquits himself well) and his brother, Jimmy (Jack Reynor, who does not) are the central players in the story around the misplaced weapon. Eli finds it—and some gruesome bodies—inside the abandoned factory where he strips wiring and piping out of the walls for an extra buck. When his adopted brother Jimmy gets back from jail indebted to the gangster Taylor (a greasy James Franco), their father is killed and the two go on the run.
Eventually, Eli pulls the gun in self-defense and Jimmy starts capitalizing on how many obstacles ostensibly vanish in America once you’ve got the biggest gun. There’s a lot of subtext here that isn’t being explored more deeply, subtext that the film neared time and again and that I was personally hoping would be delved into (but, no luck): How a split family affects those within it, how two brothers of different races (Eli is black and Jimmy is white) relate to the same experience of running from the law, how gun violence and gun culture shape our benighted country. They could’ve thrown in the obvious Rick and Morty joke at least.
Instead, we get a fairly short and straightforward road trip movie, ending in a brazen shootout in a police station that ends up mostly bloodless when it should be gruesome. It’s ended when Eli, who’s never lifted a weapon before in his life and is facing off against multiple armed adults, just de-atomizes them with his sweet-ass new toy. It feels, overwhelmingly, like this was made into a YA-adjacent story when it was originally intended for a hard R rating, with the central player not the two brothers but the gore that the space-gun creates when you lovingly pull its trigger.
The movie is rated for and aimed at 13-year-olds, but it has very little to say to them. It seems to be saying to the adults at home ,“Hey, look, this is relevant. You should bring your angsty teen.”
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