The Intruder is directed by a guy named Deon Taylor and I would like to begin with an actual excerpt from his biography on IMDB: “A prolific writer, filmmaker, director and idea generator, Deon Taylor is a self-taught, creative genius. His work is innovative, his writing is cutting edge and his vision is iconic… He is always thinking outside the box, juggling creative projects with ease, and his intelligence is so profound.” After watching this movie, I call bullshit, Mr. Taylor. So much bullshit.
A couple of morons named Scott and Annie buy a house from a clearly unhinged guy named Charlie. Charlie is still attached to the $3.5 million estate (the movie explains that Scott can afford this because he works at some sort of business and just became the top business person at whatever business they do) and he refuses to leave the house behind. He hangs around to mow the lawn and come over for holiday dinners and, inevitably, becomes more and more threatening before going full-on psycho.
Innovative and cutting-edge, my ass. The Intruder is an incompetent montage of clichés ripped from other stalker thrillers (think Fatal Attraction or The Fan or Single White Female or a million other goddamn movies that are just like this). But I could be okay with that. Stalker thrillers can be fine and I don’t demand originality. What makes this movie an absolute chore to sit through is that our lead couple are two of the dumbest, blandest, most infuriatingly dim-witted pieces of shit to ever exist on screen. The Planeteer with the heart power would call these two useless. If you bought a home and the previous tenant refused to leave, would you be alarmed? This woman fucking isn’t. Charlie repeatedly shows up when she is alone, despite the fact that he was supposed to move to Florida, and she doesn’t even begin to piece together that something is wrong. She invites him over for Thanksgiving dinner, for fuck’s sake. The husband realizes that something is amiss, but, unfortunately, he’s too much of a pussy to do anything about it. He just rambles about how much he hates guns and avoids a confrontation over what is clearly a threat to his family. This movie would be about 15 minutes long if these two weren’t such jackwagons and, as a result, you end of rooting for Charlie to just kill them and get his goddamn house back.
On the bright side, we also have Dennis Quaid seemingly having the time of his life. Quaid is playing this role as if he just took an entire bottle of crazy pills and washed them down with cocaine and Jägermeister. There is absolutely no subtlety in his performance, as if he realized how oblivious the two main characters are and wanted to emphasize the fact. This movie is almost, almost, worth watching just for how over-the-top Quaid is. Almost.
I don’t have much to say about this derivative, boring nonsense. There is nothing here that isn’t lifted from another movie and then executed with the skill of a Halloween special on the Hallmark Network. Even Quaid’s ridiculous (in a good way) performance can’t make up for the painfully amateurish script and the filmmakers’ complete inability to create sympathetic protagonists. The Intruder is lazy, inept bullshit and I expected more from a self-taught creative genius, whatever the fuck that means.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intruder_(2019_film)#/media/File:The_Intruder_(2019_film)_poster.jpg
