It’s been a weird decade for Dennis Quaid, as the ‘10s have type-cast the once-reliable actor into roles as abusive dads or aging dog owners who need a bit of magic in their lives. But Deon Taylor’s The Intruder offers Quaid both a strong starring role and a potential launchpad into further genre oddities like this, and it’s really not a bad Friday night at the movies. It’s about a city-dwelling couple (Michael Ealy and Meagan Good) who buy a large country estate from a weird loner (Quaid), and soon discover that they just can’t get rid of him. Seriously, he’s just stuck to the place: One day, he’s mowing the lawn, another, he’s trying to help put up the Christmas decorations. So, the husband is naturally upset by this intrusion into their lives, and begins doing some digging into this man’s background. What he finds there isn’t so great, and he soon realizes that his family is in grave danger.
As you might have gleaned, it’s a PG-13 Straw Dogs riff that attempts to explore the same divide between the modern city-dwelling man and his rustic rural counterpart, who believes that said city folk are coming to take what is “rightfully his.” There’s plenty of fodder in that premise, and Ealy and Quaid do their best to peel some of the layers back so that these archetypes can breathe. Quaid, obviously, has the flashier performance, but his co-lead manages to give some extra shading to what would be in any other movie, a strait-laced protagonist.
Unfortunately, the same thoughtfulness doesn’t really extend to Good’s character, who is mainly relegated to slow-jam sex scenes with her on-screen husband (which are very, very funny) and poo-pooing Quaid’s emotional wounds as he steadily manipulates her. But again, this is Quaid’s film, and his delightfully unhinged performance makes it really work. He’s all leather-skin and muscle, and he’s a weirdly imposing presence, much like your average slasher villain (one can easily imagine someone putting the Halloween theme over some shots of him — like when he’s watching Ealy and Good have sex on the floor of his living room). And he’s full of enough gruff charisma that it’s almost like looking into an alternate universe where Harrison Ford had to keep working regularly after 2003.
For the most part, The Intruder is a smooth-as-hell watch, if one doesn’t mind the constant manipulation. All of the characters possess the situational awareness of a bowl of noodles, who fail to observe people a mere three feet away as they walk into rooms, or who don’t realize that the bumps in the night might be something a little less than innocuous. And if you’re in the market for a cheap scare, this would be almost like a trip to Dollar General, as it’s chock-full of the kind of jolt that horror fans regularly shit-talk. But the movie still possesses a smart sheen that compliments the propulsive plot and the solid performances, and, as such, it’s a great and trashy night at the movies. Indeed, there’s a reason why Taylor has four — yes, you read that right, four — films coming out in the next year, according to his Wikipedia page, and that’s because he’s the ideal Screen Gems director: A journeyman with some talents who can deliver a broadly accessible product quickly and cheaply. This, of course, made him the perfect workman director to tackle a project like this, and the resulting product is solid as hell.