Movie reviews and random thoughts about writing and stuff
Having decided to sit through all three movies (so far) of The Purge franchise, I might as well get them out of the way in short order. Last night, after returning home from a night out with the wife, that included a trip to Best Buy to try Sony’s Playstation VR, I settled down to watch the second in the series: The Purge: Anarchy.
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I, like a lot of people, dismissed Hardcore Henry from the trailers as probably too gimmicky to be worthwhile, so I didn’t bother going to see it. I also couldn’t stand the title. As well as that, I’m not much of a fan of the producer Timur Bekmambetov (Night Watch, Wanted) – no particular reason for that other than I haven’t enjoyed the movies of his I’ve seen. Months passed, and I had the chance to view a copy the other night. Feeling the need for a pallet cleanser from The Killing Joke travesty, I fired it up.
I’ll preface this review with two truisms. The first being I am NOT a fan of animation, the second being I am a HUGE fan of the seminal graphic novel Batman: The Killing Joke. Oh wait, there’s a third truism – this review is not going to go well.
You know that recent movie with Ryan Reynolds where a character is dying of cancer, but calls a mysterious phone number because it comes with a promise to save his life? Oh no, I don’t mean that Ryan Reynolds movie (Deadpool, just in case you’ve been living under rock in 2016), I’m talking about Self/Less! Here, Ben Kingsley (Ghandi, Iron Man 3) plays Damian Hale, the afflicted character whose cancer is the plot driver, and Reynolds is the focus of the plot from the end of act 1 onward.
I don’t recall exactly why I wanted to see Bone Tomahawk – despite seeing some great movies in the genre, I’ve never been a huge fan of Westerns. For me, they work better when the genre is used as a backdrop for less conventional stories (The Hateful Eight and The Revenant are two good examples), so it’s entirely possible that the words “horror” and “cannibals” are what pushed me over. It also has Kurt Russell in it, an actor I always enjoy watching.
The Purge, written and directed by James DeMonaco, is a pretty silly premise – that for twelve hours one night of the week all crime including murder is legal (except for some notable exceptions, like some elected officials). The movie posits that at some time in the immediate future there’s a sweeping, drastic overhaul of the US Government, so that by 2022 crime has been significantly reduced by means of this annual release of pent up negative emotions, etc. It’s a horror movie premise that doesn’t have any root in reality whatsoever.
