It’s always a red flag when a movie begins with the main character waving a gun around, covered in blood, and then it cuts to a title card saying “Eight Hours Earlier,” or anything to that effect. Sure, it sounds like an intriguing way to open a film but more often than not — much, much, much more often — it’s a sign that the first act was boring and desperately needed to be goosed up. The film isn’t telling the audience “good news, the thrills are coming,” it’s saying “bad news, it’s gonna be a long wait.”
The new thriller “The Gates” opens with Mason Gooding waving a gun around, covered in blood. Eight hours earlier, we see he’s not waving a gun around, or covered in blood. He’s just a normal guy named Derek. His best friend Tyon (Keith Powers) and his two-degrees-of-Kevin Bacon friend Kevin (Algee Smith) pick him up in a nice car and drag him on an impromptu road trip. There’s a party, and attractive women are going to be there, and they all seem to like attractive women, so off they go.
Oh no! There’s a giant freeway traffic jam in the middle of nowhere in rural Texas! So they take a detour, and that detour dead ends at a gated community. Instead of turning around, they ask a white woman to open the gate for them. She looks at these three Black men and asks, “You wanna go in there?” as though they were three coniferous trees asking directions to a local paper mill. But she lets them in anyway, because otherwise there’s no movie.
This is such an obvious and ominous portent that you half expect “The Gates” to be a proper horror movie, about a gated community run by militant white supremacists or billionaire cannibals. Instead, writer/director John Burr has something more Hitchcockian on his mind. Derek, Tyon and Kevin can’t drive through the back gate either, but when they stop at a fancy house to ask for help, they witness a murder, and now they’re stuck in Creekview Hills, a place where everyone is too racist to believe them.
There’s a directness to “The Gates” that’s easy to admire. Burr’s script is forthright about its themes, and foreshadows the hell out of them. Although Derek was raised in relative affluence, and is eager to trust authority figures like the police, Tyon and Algee know better, so they don’t want to go to the cops. They just saw a rich white man murder somebody, and they want to get out of there before they’re next.
But their behavior is inconsistent. They know that police in rich communities — and in general, but especially in rich communities — will eye them suspiciously, and pull them over for no reason, but they’re also gung ho about driving through the wealthiest gated community in Texas, and don’t even think twice before shouting obscenities at the locals, just for funsies. “The Gates” wants us to believe its characters are smarter than that, but it also needs them to behave like they’re not, or else the plot can’t happen.
The overall tenor of Creekview Hills isn’t consistent either. In their first direct confrontation with the locals, a white father calmly tells his young child to shoot and murder them, as though that’s normal behavior in this neighborhood. But that’s not the case, it’s just a town full of snooty people with varying degrees of racism. They’re not all murderers. Some might even be redeemable. And then there are the white rappers who assume Kevin can lay down a track for them, because he’s Black, in a scene that makes it look like he’s being forced to perform under threat of violence, but which he gets weirdly into anyway. As though he has nothing else on his mind tonight.
The murderer, Jacob, is played by the late James Van Der Beek in his final movie role. He is, to be clear, excellent as a man who feels threatened and invincible at the same time. Jacob has to get rid of a body and eliminate three threats, since he’s a church leader, a community leader and the husband of a politician, and he has a lot to lose. But he also knows he’s rich, Christian and white and can turn everybody against our three heroes by saying, essentially, “Trust me, I’m rich, Christian and white.” For most of “The Gates” he’s an insidious threat. By the end he’s more like a cartoon, growling vague statements like “This isn’t over” and then bugging his eyes out, wacky-like, and dashing off-screen.
That’s funny, but it would work better if the rest of “The Gates” had a sense of humor. The residents of Creekview Hills are, to one degree or another, almost all despicable and worthy of getting roasted. The idea of Jacob exuding respectability at the start of the film and gradually dwindling into a pathetic joke has the potential to be powerful. But this film is deathly serious, and it’s hard to make “deathly serious” engaging for an hour-and-a-half if you don’t have something propulsive going on. Or at least something pulpy.
Unfortunately, “The Gates” is a bit rusty. The cast is blameless. Mason Gooding, in particular, is on a winning streak, proving his mettle in every film, whether the rest of the film is good or not. But the pacing never picks up any speed. Our heroes are forced to constantly duck into bushes and regroup, over and over again, before wandering into more episodic scenes at different houses, where the danger somehow de-escalates over time. If anything, the heroes seem safer as the movie progresses, at least up until the arch, unconvincing conclusion, which puts way more faith in the police than you’d think, given how literally every other scene in “The Gates” plays out.
“The Gates” is constantly on the verge of getting better, sometimes on the verge of getting good, but it never quite gets there. It’s a missed opportunity for thrills, social commentary, humor and/or horror. Like many films of its ilk, the overall message is “don’t go in there.” But that’s supposed to be a warning about Creekview Hills, not the movie theater.
