3 Short Paragraphs: Kin

2018, Jonathan & Josh Baker (the original Bag Man) -- download

I am fan of those scifi shorts that are all over YouTube and Vimeo. Young directors/writers/special effects teams cut their teeth on something self-contained, something fully thought out without the need to put in the filler material to round out the three acts of a feature film. Typically on limited budgets, they contain the story to a few sets, and round out the rest with CGI. And they can explore ideas that would never generally see the light of day on the big screen.

Kin started as the short Bag Man by twins Jonathan & Josh Baker, about a kid who travels from an urban setting, to the countryside and along the way we find out what he has in the bag, which I cannot do this post, without revealing its a futuristic / alien rifle. The short is just absolutely lovely, so lovingly shot, well lit and tightly acted.

Kin is that expansion into feature film and, well, its not all that successful. It suffers the expected failings of having plot & characterization inflated to meet a full movie, and meet with the typical expectations of the scifi movie audience money backers. We take the black city kid, this time with adoptive father (requisite recognizable face; Dennis Quaid) and ex-con adoptive brother, who gets the kid mixed up in his ex-con trouble. But he has a laser gun, found on the body of some unknown battle-suited soldier in an abandoned warehouse, and with it he & his brother lead the bad guys on a merry chase across the US. Add in a stripper with a heart of gold (Zoë Kravitz) and a cameo by Michael B Jordan, and we have a run of the mill action-er, that barely remembers the quality directing of the short.