Out of Exile

Had the pleasure of watching this on the big screen. Kyle Kauwika Harris nailed it once again. The cast all played perfect parts that I feel were made for them. Hats off to the entire team that put this together. The movie touches on so many complex subjects of why each person is going down the path they are on. Whether it be childhood trauma, broken brother bonds, PTSD and the effects of war, love, friendship, hate, fear, wanting a better life, children. The characters have their reasons, sometimes surprising you on how deep those reasons run. The writing makes you feel this and root for the "bad guy". Best independent film to come out of Oklahoma in a long time. Bravo, everyone!

Nothing original here. It's a recycled regurgitated story we've seen over and over again.

The sound editing is choppy and inconsistent. Especially during the stripper scene using crisp new dollar bills?!!

Actors acting and overacting. The bouncing camera gets tired and nauseating especially during the garage scene. At this point it's no longer watchable. The news reporter during the bar scene was awful and the bar fight argument was so over the top over or under acting it's hard to tell. Mixed with the bouncing camera is nauseating.

It's officially unwatchable at this point.

For a highschool or first year film school it would get a 4 or 5/10 at best. The script and story is tired. I can't even social media with it on in the background.

The high rating reviews are extremely exaggerated just like the acting.

Out of Exile is garbage. It immediately reeks of streaming-level quality. I thought about quitting 15 minutes in. I should have. Every aspect of this movie is bad.

The acting (and overacting) are the easiest giveaway. The story seems like it was written by artificial intelligence, copying parts of other movies of the genre. The "action" scenes are useless. The only good thing I can think of is it was able to get me invested in the lead character and his relationship with his daughter. Otherwise, it's pretty much a waste of time.

Streaming services are ruining my love for movies. I would guess somewhere around 90% are terrible, 9% are mediocre, and 1% are actually good. I think going forward I will only watch theatrical movies unless I hear multiple recommendations for a streaming movie. (1 viewing, 3/26/2023)

Clearly this was a low budget B film, and I can accept that, but I've never seen a film take such a fall in the final act as this film did. It actually had a decent score for a B film, and the cinematography was good. Writer and director Kyle Kauwika Harris did a fairly decent job directing, but failed to direct his cast properly, as most barely looked awake or wanting to be in the film, specifically Adam Hampton, who's acting was the worst, and was the most unconvincing character of them all. Not sure why he was cast as the lead.

This film needed lots of editing and cutting down, because there just wasn't enough meaty narrative to effectively fill in the 107 min runtime, and the snail speed pacing made it feel much longer. Although this story had nothing new to offer that hasn't been done many times before, and much better, at least the first two acts had a cohesive narrative, albeit cliched with the many unnecessary and mostly time-wasting sub plots and familiar genre tropes.

But Kauwika's third act unraveled so bad with tons of plot holes, and became convoluted so bad, it created more questions than answers. It tried to be smart, but failed. It's like Kauwika threw everything and the kitchen sink into the final act, hoping something would stick, and got too lazy to wrap up the viewers impatient investment of the first two acts, into a cohesive resolution. So much didn't make any sense in that third act. Had Kauwika wrapped up the narrative without the easily avoidable plot holes, I could've easily given this a 6 or a 7/10. But investing my time only to end up with an unsatisfied ending with more questions than answers, was annoying. Don't waste your time with this like I did.

I had not heard about this 2022 crime thriller titled "Out of Exile" from writer and director Kyle Kauwike Harris prior to stumbling upon it here in 2023. And of course I opted to watch it, on account of it being a movie that I hadn't already seen.

And while "Out of Exile" was watchable, it was ultimately a rather generic crime thriller. The movie offered nothing extraordinary to the genre that hasn't been done or seen in other movies before it. Now, don't get me wrong here, because "Out of Exile" is a fair enough movie and certainly is watchable for a single viewing, just take into consideration that it is a generic movie.

Of all the cast members in this movie, I was only familiar with Peter Greene. And looking through the cast members here on IMDb, I am surprised to see that former wrester Jake "The Snake" Roberts was in the movie as well, I couldn't recognize him on the screen at all.

The storyline in "Out of Exile" was adequate, just a shame that the movie was run page by page from the 'how to make a crime thriller' handbook.

Watchable and enjoyable for what it was, "Out of Exile" is adequate for a single viewing. There is not enough meat on the storyline to support more than a single viewing though.

My rating of "Out of Exile" lands on a five out of ten stars.