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STUDIO: Lion’s Gate
MSRP: 20.99
RATED: PG-13
RUNNING TIME: 86 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
Poem Reading
Behind-the-Scenes
The Pitch
Cujo in a house… with a big cat.
The Humans
Briana Evigan, Charlie Tahan, Garret Dillahunt, Meat Loaf
Director: Carlos Brooks
Writers: David Higgins, Christine Coyle Johnson, Julie Prendiville Roux
The Nutshell
When Kelly (Briana Evigan) goes to check her autistic younger brother Tom (Charlie Tahan) into a hospital before she leaves for college, she learns that her stepfather, Johnny (Garret Dillahunt), has withdrawn all the money from the account her recently deceased mother left her. What did Johnny think was more important than Tom’s care? Why buying a Bengal tiger for the safari he plans to build in their backyard, of course. When Kelly returns home to confront Johnny she finds him and his crew boarding up the house for a rapidly approaching hurricane. Kelly’s future looks unsure; then it looks like she might have no future at all. That night when she wakes up to get a drink of water and finds that the tiger has somehow gotten into the house. Worse yet, the fortifications to keep the storm out now serve to keep Kelly and Tom in. In with the tiger… dun dun dunnn!
The Lowdown
Burning Bright is so close. So very close. Throughout its runtime it is always threatening to become a really great flick, coming within arm’s reach on a number of occasions, but ultimately it never quite gets its fingers around the greatness. As is, we are left with an unspectacular but totally solid, little animal run amok thriller. And you know what? At the end of the day there ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.
Awwwww…
Burning Bright will likely surprise you, both in positive and negative ways. Negatively, the surprise may be that this isn’t actually a horror movie. It is a thriller. There aren’t kills here. The film rolls out in almost real time from the moment Kelly and Tom become trapped, and this isn’t the kind of film where the friendly sheriff comes to check in on them and then gets horribly mutilated. This is a film about running and hiding and near misses. It is PG-13 and would be very well suited for TV airings. Those looking for lots of savage tiger attacks will likely find this a tedious let down.
I for one was surprised by what a legitimate film Burning Bright wants to be. It takes its time getting into the thriller portion and puts a lot of its weight on drama, in particular the conflict and frustration Kelly has being forced to take care of Tom. It doesn’t always succeed with these scenes, but I found the attempt refreshing nonetheless.
Part of the problem with these dramatic moments (as far as what’s holding back total success) is that the character of Tom doesn’t quite work, often feeling hackneyed and forced. I don’t know anything about autism, so the film could be dead-on with its representation, but that doesn’t matter if I’m not buying it within the context of the film. The film needs to make me buy in, even if it is making shit up. I simply wasn’t buying Tom. He felt like a device more so than a character. Part of the problem was just the writing, but a lot of it was the performance of Charlie Tahan. I really hate ragging on child actors. It is not like Tahan is bad, but a boy with autism is the kind of role people win awards playing. Because it is tough. To sell the part Tahan needed to be amazing, and he was merely acceptable.
Briana Evigan surprised me. She certainly left an impression in Step Up 2, but it was an impression on my jeans (if you can follow my supple innuendo). Honestly I thought she was a professional dancer, not an actress, but she does quite well in this film, proving that she can do more than just take it to the streets. And for those leering fans of her skimpy outfits from Step Up 2, you’ll be pleased to know she spends almost the entirety of the film running around in a little tank top and boy shorts.
What musculature!
Garret Dillahunt (Deadwood) is sublime as always. What I find most amazing about the guy is that he’s essentially always acting exactly the same, yet somehow he is able to work that monotone performance into an endless array of new characters. It makes no sense. But he does it. He isn’t given a lot to do here, but his presence is welcome whenever he’s on screen. Meat Loaf pops up in the opening scene, which I thought was the worst part of the entire movie. This opening scene is everything the rest of the movie isn’t, thank god. The dialogue and staging is all overcooked, trying to goose tension where there simply is none. I am assuming Brooks felt the opening needed to pop as much as possible to offset the otherwise slow burn of the first act.
Now, enough with the stupid humans. Let’s talk some tiger. Brooks made the very wise decision to always use a real tiger. While there are several awkwardly rendered composites, there is no CG in the film. Just flesh and blood tiger. Burning Bright could have easily gone to a very laughable place very quickly with CG. Using a real tiger put a limit on what the animal could do, which I think is more helpful than harmful. It kept a lot of the action at a believable pace.
Dillahunt: most unsettling babysitter ever.
The use of the tiger is great, but this portion of the film is far from perfect storywise. We’re told at the beginning by Meat Loaf that the tiger was banned from the circus for killing a horse. Apparently the tiger ran past twelve other horses just to get this one because “it was the prettiest.” We also learn the tiger hasn’t been fed for two weeks. These two factoids I believe are supposed to explain why the tiger so relentlessly pursues Kelly, and it does up to a point. But the film crosses that point very quickly. The tiger repeatedly smashes down doors trying to get to Kelly, which is something I have a hard time believing a tiger would do. I have an even harder time believing the tiger would smash her cell phone to pieces when it hears it ringing, and that it isn’t afraid of a human holding a torch in its face.
Another ongoing problem is that despite the incredibly simple layout of the house, I would often lose track of the tiger. In some scenes the tiger will smash through doors, stopping at nothing to reach Kelly and Tom. Then in other scenes Kelly will have all the time in the world to look around a room and talk to Tom. Where is the tiger at this point? If it only took the tiger a minute to break a door down, why does it take it five minutes to leave the room and go downstairs after Kelly and Tom escape?
The film has a lot of fun, smart scenes, but it also asks for a lot of suspended disbelief. The windows of the house are all boarded up. I like that Kelly tries to break through the boards every time she encounters a new window, that’s realism, what becomes a stretch is how completely impossible it is for her to break through. Then there is the crowbar. She finds a fucking crowbar, but doesn’t try and loosen the boards with it? That’s what a crowbar was invented for! And I won’t bother getting into her completely incompetent use of the handgun she finds. You get the picture.
All-in-all, this is an entertaining and at times surprisingly good film. As long as you’re not expecting the moon (or gore), you might enjoy yourself. I did.
For those who have already seen the film or don’t care about having the ending spoiled, please enjoy this animated gif.
The Package
There is a feature listed as an “Introduction by Briana Evigan.” This is in actuality just audio of Evigan reading “The Tyger” by William Blake, the poem from which the film gets its title. There is also a really nice behind-the-scenes doc that goes into detail about the process of shooting with the films tigers.
