Coyotes (Ugly)

Director Colin Minihan's Coyotes is a lame thriller about inconsistently-designed bloodthirsty CGI coyotes terrorizing a family in the Hollywood Hills. Clocking in with a 92-minute run-time, it's still far too long for a threadbare premise and a complete lack of style or thrills.

For our family we get the workaholic dad (Justin Long), the worried wife (Kate Bosworth), and the moody teenager (Mila Harris as the only highlight of this dreary production). Yeah, screenwriters Tad Daggerhart and Nick Simon aren't breaking a sweat here with their world building. We also get their shitty neighbors (Norbert Leo Butz, Kevin Glynn, Norma Nivia, and Katherine McNamara), a self-obsessed prostitute (Brittany Allen), and Keir O'Donnell a creepy exterminator whose part appears to have been written for an entirely different movie.

As for the coyotes, the CGI villains are hard to take seriously. There are shots where they look cool against fire (needed as the coyotes themselves aren't enough of a threat). However, there are many, many shots where their aggressiveness and growling can't make up for their lack of size. In a thriller where we aren't given a single reason to root for the humans to survive our coyotes aren't cool enough to root for either.

While the script (eventually) offers a reason for them to be more aggressive, they are far from adequate movie monsters (especially in a neighborhood filled with an abundance of guns and various everyday items which can be easily used to defeat them). There's a missing piece here to elevate them into the on-screen threat the family takes them to be.

With cooler monsters, or leaning into a cheaper and cheesier tone which would arguably fit far better with the ridiculous premise, this minimal effort may have stood a chance. Instead, what we get is a lackluster affair that makes you sorry that so many of these familiar faces have fallen on hard enough times to let themselves be cast in Coyotes.

• Title: Coyotes
• IMDb: link