What a horrifying thought, right? Allowing American citizens to purge their violent tendencies one night every year. What would you do? Would you give into that primal urge or would you do what you could to hide away and protect your family. It’s a premise ripe with possibilities but unfortunately, “The Purge” just kinda glosses over them in favor of becoming just like every other similar horror movie.
“The Purge” plays out like the bastard child of “The Hostage” and “The Strangers”, focusing on one family who is threatened by crazy wack jobs who are out to purge their urge, something that it seems like they’d probably do anyway.
It might not be all that plausible that the characters played by Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn in “The Internship” are so completely clueless about today’s technology. But it’s a belief you will have to be willing to suspend, at least for the first half of the movie to get any real enjoyment out of it.
The good news here is that this movie, about two guys who lose their sales jobs and somehow manage to secure internships at Google, has a solid second half and proves that Vaughn and Wilson still have that great chemistry that helped make “Wedding Crashers” a comedy hit a few years ago.
I know what you’re thinking — movies about magic hardly ever work. We saw a good example of a good idea gone wrong with the recent “Burt Wonderstone“. The problem with that movie was that it was too predictable — i.e. it was everything “Now You See Me” isn’t.
Thanks to a great cast and a fun script that was cobbled together by five — count ’em five — screenwriters — the movie is a surprisingly fun movie, with twists and turns around every corner. It actually manages to create the energy and wonder of a great magic show. You know it’s BS and if you look closely you can see the smoke and mirrors but it’s still too much fun to care about that you’re being played.
What a horrifying thought, right? Allowing American citizens to purge their violent tendencies one night every year. What would you do? Would you give into that primal urge or would you do what you could to hide away and protect your family. It’s a premise ripe with possibilities but unfortunately, “The Purge” just kinda glosses over them in favor of becoming just like every other similar horror movie.
