Fight for Your Life

This might well be the most heavy-handed version yet of Joseph Hayes’s The Desperate Hours (novel 1954, play 1955). It starts from the same basic premise: a group of escaped jailbirds breaks into a family home and takes the owners hostage. The big difference is in the ethnic makeup of the two camps. In Hayes, they’re all white. Here, though, the Turner (!) preacher family is Black, while the leader of the intruders, a racist redneck named Kane (!), is white and his underlings Ling and Chino are Asian and Hispanic. Yep, there’s symbolism galore, and the film bludgeons its philosophy into your skull. (Olaf Möller)