Main cast: Dan Stevens (Charlie), Alison Brie (Michelle), Sheila Vand (Mina), Jeremy Allen White (Josh), and Toby Huss (Taylor)
Director: Dave Franco
When I am told that The Rental is Dave Franco’s directorial debut, it seems like I’m expected to be excited. My actual reaction is to blink and say, “So?” I’m quite indifferent to the Franco brothers, to be honest. Nothing they have done have actually impressed me, and sometimes they seem to be just pulling themselves in public with their Hollywood BFFs for their own laughs and kicks, maybe to get some tax write-off with the movies that result. I know, I’m supposed to be see them as kind of savants, but I actually find them vastly overrated.
This one is certainly well put together. Good cinematography, good lighting, pretty good acting all around—the technical aspects are certainly fine enough to normally qualify this one as a three-oogie movie. At the same time, though, it’s a movie about unlikable turds running around acting like buckets of smarm until someone has had enough and try to kill them off like that person is the answer to my prayers.
Charlie and his wife Michelle rent a nice big house by the sea for some R&R with his brother Josh and Josh’s girlfriend Mina. The whole thing seems fine, until it becomes apparent quickly that Charlie doesn’t think much of his less successful ex-con brother. Worse, he’s also cheating on Michelle with Mina, who also happens to be his business partner. The whole drama begins when Charlie and Mina have sex in the shower while their respective partners are snoozing away, and later Mina discovers that someone, likely the owner of the house Taylor, has installed a camera in the shower. That means there is evidence of them boinking on the sly so oh no, maybe Taylor is a bigger creep than the two of them!
They all continue to act like idiots until Taylor ends up dead and they all believe that Josh must have accidentally killed him during an earlier altercation. Oh, what will they do now?
Michelle is probably the only one here that doesn’t grate on my nerves too much, but even then, it’s hard to work up any strong feelings for her one way or the other, as she, like the other characters, spend the bulk of the movie behaving like they are in some kind of reality show featuring rich, vapid, and unlikable people. Josh is earnest but like Michelle, he’s so good at being a loser that it’s hard to muster much sympathy for him. As for Charlie and Mina, ugh, they are such wastes of flesh and everyone’s time.
The biggest problem of The Rental, though, is that for a supposed thriller, the villain feels too much like a plot device introduced merely to tie up loose ends and get rid of characters so that the movie can thankfully come to an end after meandering around interminably. This villain is neither menacing nor terrifying. If anything, this plot device feels too much like some watered down carbon copy of similar villains in far better home invasion/stranger-in-your-house movies.
Indeed, that’s what this movie feels like at the end of the day—a soulless attempt to replicate those better movies. The production values are top notch, but the whole thing remains a dry, thrill-free bore.
