First Kill (2017)

First Kill arrives with the grim efficiency of a direct-to-video thriller, which is to say it arrives, fulfills a contractual obligation, and departs. Hayden Christensen plays a Wall Street broker who takes his family to rural Ohio to bond with a son who is being bullied at school. Bruce Willis plays the local police chief. A hunting trip goes wrong. A wounded bank robber takes the boy hostage, and the plot proceeds through double crosses, a stashed key, and a mailbox full of stolen cash. It is competent, joyless, and entirely without ideas beyond the next gunshot.

For the purposes of this classification, the film offers almost nothing to examine. The cast is white and the story is white, not as an argument but as a default. No character's identity is interrogated, celebrated, or even mentioned. The one female figure of consequence is Laura, a surgeon, and she spends most of the running time bandaged, abducted, or held at gunpoint, which is a function of screenwriting laziness, not ideology. The bank robbery that sets everything in motion is motivated by a dying mother's medical bills and police greed, not by any critique of capital; the protagonist is a broker, and the film regards him with mild sympathy throughout.

There is a bully subplot, and a lesson about standing up for oneself that the film delivers through a dying criminal bonding with a child over video games. That is as close as we come to a thesis, and it is closer to a fortune cookie than a sermon. The violence is functional, the villains are corrupt cops, and the resolution involves a boy pushing a man off a ladder and a father shooting a police chief in the head. Nothing in it argues for a better world or scolds us for the current one. It simply wants to be over, and by the final scene, when the family surrenders its rifle and drives home, we want the same thing.