The Purge

The Purge - Dir. James DeMonaco (2013)

"Blessed be the New Founding Fathers for letting us Purge and cleanse our souls, Blessed be America, a nation reborn."

2013 was quite the year for Ethan Hawke. In August, he starred in Getaway, which received some of the worst reviews of the year. Earlier in the year, Hawke also starred in Before Midnight, the third picture in Richard Linklater's critically praised trilogy. While Getaway garnered a paltry 3% on Rotten Tomatoes, Before Midnight landed an impressive 98% and will surely find its way on numerous best-of year end lists. Not to be forgotten is The Purge, a low-budget thriller that came out around the same time as Before Midnight. Although the reviews were lukewarm, The Purge did take in over $87 million at the box office. Quite the haul considering the release date was sandwiched in between Fast and Furious 6 and Man of Steel with Iron Man 3 and Star Trek into Darkness still going strong.

The Purge takes place in the year 2022 as America sees crime rates and unemployment at an all-time low. This is attributed to an annual event known as 'The Purge,' a 12-hour period in which all crime, including murder, is legal. Well, almost all crime. Weapons of mass destruction are off limits and high-ranking government officials are not to be touched. Other than that, anything goes.

Thanks to the Purge, James Sandin (Hawke) has done extremely well for himself by selling high-tech security systems. He's sold quite a few to fellow residents in his affluent suburban neighborhood, enough to build a new addition to his spacious McMansion. As the Purge commences, Sandin puts his home on lockdown and settles in for a quiet night with the wife, Mary (Lena Headey), and kids, Charlie (Max Burkholder) and Zoey (Adelaide Kane). However, Charlie notices a wounded man (Edwin Hodge) outside the house crying for help. Against his father's protests, Charlie lets the stranger in and sets off a deadly chain of events. A gang of masked assailants come knocking to demand the Sandins hand over the "homeless pig" or they will tear down the gates and kill everyone in the house.

The Purge was written and directed by James DeMonaco, who was previously a screenwriter on The Negotiator and the remake of Assault on Precinct 13 that also starred Hawke. As a siege and home invasion picture, The Purge has a lot in common with the original Assault as well as The Strangers with Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman. It has all the hallmarks of a B-movie, but DeMonaco seeks to elevate the material with some heavy-handed political rhetoric. The country is under the sway of a group called the New Founding Fathers, an obvious analogue for the Tea Party, and participating in the Purge is seen as a patriotic duty. Of course, the easiest targets are the poor and disenfranchised, such as the stranger, who happens to be black and a veteran. The villains are young, white, and led by a handsome gentleman (Rhys Wakefield) with blue blooded affectations and a prep school uniform.

Wakefield gives a creepy performance and his gaunt frame makes him look like the perfect candidate to play a Batman villain. Hawke and Headey are also good, but the acting and the concept aren't enough to shake off the silliness.

The Purge requires a little suspension of disbelief. Just because people are allowed to cut loose for one day a year, doesn't necessarily mean they'll be law-abiding citizens are the other 364 days. Also, the characters behave in foolish ways that seem to be dictated by whatever is required to progress the story. Characters decide to split up like a bunch of teenagers in a slasher flick. The second act consists of the Sandins searching their home and arguing over what to do with the stranger. At least, the climax is action packed as a free-for-all erupts between the wholesome nuclear family and the bloodthirsty invaders.

The Purge won't be mistaken for serious cinema though it does work as a solid genre piece. The story is simplistic and, at less than 90 minutes, the film moves at a brisk pace.

Rating: ** (*****)

New York, I Love You

New York, I Love You - Dirs. Various (2009)


Anthology films are always a mixed bag filled with hits and misses. New York, I Love You is the follow-up to Paris, je t’aime and the second in the “Cities of Love” franchise. Films set in Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, and Jerusalem are coming.

Paris featured a series of short films set in the City of Lights and directed by a talented assortment of filmmakers such as Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men), Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep), Gus Van Sant, Wes Craven, and the Coen Brothers. Its successor is comprised of several shorts about romance in the Big Apple. Though the directors aren’t of the same pedigree as Paris, New York has assembled an A-list ensemble of actors. Unlike Paris, New York attempts to connect each story with interstitials of the various characters bumping into each other.

The film begins with a segment by actor/director Jiang Wen (Devils on the Doorstep) with Hayden Christensen as a pickpocket who runs into Rachel Bilson and a more experienced thief in Andy Garcia. Mira Nair directs the next short starring Natalie Portman as a Hasidic Jew negotiating a sale of jewelry with a Hindu man. They bond over their respective relationships and religions. Portman also makes her directorial debut with a later vignette involving a male nanny (Carlos Acosta) and his young charge.

Scarlett Johansson also made her directorial debut with a black & white segment starring Kevin Bacon. Titled “These Vagabond Shoes,” it was cut from the theatrical release, but is available on the DVD.

It says a lot about New York, I Love You when the strongest episode is the one directed by freakin’ Brett Ratner. His segment features Anton Yelchin taking a blind date to the prom. The date (Olivia Thirlby) arrives at the door in a wheelchair. It’s a cute short that doesn’t end quite as you’d expect. Joshua Marston (Maria Full of Grace) helms the second best segment with Eli Wallach and Cloris Leachman as an elderly couple bickering along the streets of NY.

The movie makes its audience feel like a passive viewer floating through the lives of the city’s inhabitants. Unfortunately, these lives are just plain dull. Everything is so innocuous. None of the directors have anything interesting to say about love, relationships, or the city. Except for a scene in Central Park, there’s nothing distinctly New York about the film. It could have been called Toronto, I Love You without much difference.

All the shorts look exactly the same with the sequence by Shekhar Kepur who took over from the late Anthony Minghella. Kepur gives his piece an ethereal quality grounded by the wonderful presence of Julie Christie as a blind opera singer. However, everything is so confoundingly pretentious (or pretentiously confounding, if you prefer) coupled with Shia LaBeouf laughingly playing a crippled bellhop with some indiscernible accent. Mutt Williams as Igor.

New York, I Love You may be a slick and polished affair, but it has all the substance of a bad student film festival.

Rating: *

Brooklyn's Finest

Brooklyn's Finest - Dir. Antoine Fuqua (2010)


Director Antoine Fuqua began his career by helming music videos for artists such as Prince, Usher, and Coolio. He graduated to feature filmmaking with Chow Yun-Fat’s debut in Hollywood, The Replacement Killers. Fuqua scored big with the gritty cop drama, Training Day, which was bolstered by an Oscar-winning performance from Denzel Washington as the dirty cop to end all dirty cops. Fuqua returns to the urban drama with Brooklyn’s Finest, featuring three separate storylines set in the projects of Brownsville in Brooklyn, New York.

Fuqua reunites with Training Day star Ethan Hawke for the first storyline. Hawke is Det. Sal Procida who finds an honest cop’s salary isn’t covering the bills. He’s got three kids, a pregnant wife (Lili Taylor) with asthma and twins on the way, and a house that’s too small with mold in the walls. In order to make ends meet, Sal has been taking money from drug busts. When we first meet him, he puts a bullet into the head of one criminal before robbing him.

Don Cheadle is Det. Clarence “Tango” Butler, an undercover cop who’s been out in the field too long. All he wants is a cushy desk job and a chance to get his live back. That chance may come when Tango’s old friend, Casanova “Caz” Phillips (Wesley Snipes), is released from prison. The feds and Tango’s C.O. want him to set Caz up in a sting operation so they can boot him back to the penitentiary for no other reason than he’d be a big bust. Tango is deeply conflicted as Caz had saved his life and genuinely seems to want to go straight.

Richard Gere is Eddie Dugan, a uniformed cop and veteran on the force. He’s led an unremarkable career and is only days away from retirement. He finds solace at the bottom of a whiskey bottle and in the arms of a prostitute (Shannon Kane) who is the furthest thing from Julia Roberts. The brass wants Eddie to mentor a few rookies and he’s reluctant about it. Eddie’s advice to his first rookie is ”…eyes open and keep walking.” The rookie is disgusted with Eddie’s utter apathy to the job, but Eddie has absolutely no desire to be a hero.

The cast also includes Will Patton as Tango’s commanding officer, Ellen Barkin as a federal agent, Brian F. O’Byrne as Sal’s partner, and The Wire’s Michael K. Williams as one of Caz’s partners in crime. The screenplay was penned by first-timer Michael C. Martin who was a train conductor for the New York subway. He was still working his day job up until a week before shooting.

There have been quite a lot of these multi-tiered pictures in recent years. Crash, Syriana, and Babel are probably the most high-profile while other films like The Air I Breathe, Powder Blue, Crossing Over, and The Burning Plain failed to garner similar critical acclaim. Brooklyn’s Finest will likely fall into the latter category.

Brooklyn’s Finest is essentially a collection of nearly every cop movie cliché. At first glance, the only thing missing is the perpetually angry police captain. We have world weary cops, religiously conflicted cops, dirty cops, clean cops, experienced cops, rookie cops, etc. The film lacks any sort of nuances or deeper layers. The stories run parallel to each other though Fuqua and Martin toss in a few obligatory scenes where the characters bump into each other, both figuratively and literally. All three plot threads build to a contrived conclusion in which the trio of main characters arrives in the same neighborhood at the same time to meet their fates.

Brooklyn’s Finest treads into more than familiar territory. The acting is strong and the most interesting scenes feature the always-dependable Don Cheadle and Wesley Snipes who play well off each other. Snipes hasn’t starred in a theatrical release since Blade: Trinity and this is a welcome return. It is unfortunate the material is so weak and formulaic.

Rating: **

Daybreakers

Daybreakers - Peter & Michael Spierig (2010)


The Spierig Brothers made their feature film debut with the low-budget zombie flick, Undead. Now, the twin siblings tackle vampires, turning them back into the bloodsucking fiends they were meant to be. Set nine years from now, Daybreakers revolves around a world almost entirely populated with vampires. A plague originated from bats turned many while others were willingly bitten out of a fear of death. Humans are rounded up by the military, kept like cattle, and slowly drained of their blood. But now, the human race is close to extinction and the blood supply is dwindling away. Without blood, the vampires will de-evolve into feral bat-like monstrosities nicknamed “subsiders.”

Ethan Hawke plays a hematologist named Edward Dalton. Unlike that other Edward, he’s no sparkly pretty boy, but he does mope a lot. Dalton is the equivalent of a vampire vegan. He refuses to drink human blood and feels pity for the humans. Dalton is in the employ of Bromley Marks, a pharmaceutical conglomerate run by Charles Bromley (Sam Neill). Dalton has been working on a suitable blood substitute to no avail.

Following a chance encounter, Dalton becomes a part of the human underground led by the crossbow wielding beauty Audrey Bennett (Claudia Karvan) and former vampire Lionel “Elvis” Cormac (Willem Dafoe with a silly Southern accent). Elvis hasn’t a clue how he was changed back, but Dalton sees this as the chance to cure the previously thought incurable. Other characters include Edward’s brother Frank (Michael Dorman), a soldier in the human hunting army; and Alison (Isabel Lucas), Bromley’s daughter who ran away when her father turned.

Daybreakers has put some thought into what the world would be like if it went vampire. There are ads for teeth whitener and we see a homeless man holds a cardboard sign reading, ”Will work for blood.” Dafoe’s character did custom car work and was the first to develop day-time driving add-ons, like shields and roof-top cameras. Aside from those cute ideas, the Spierig Bros. never go into very intricate details about the socio-political structure of the world. Is religion a thing of the past? With blood evaporating, you’d think war between nations would be inevitable.

Speaking of which, Daybreakers is full of obvious allusions to the environmental concerns of today. Despite the high-falutin’ themes, it never attempts to be anything but a lowbrow actioner. It has some nasty moments that will jolt you out of your seat such as when a body explodes out of nowhere. As the climax kicks in, the film descends into a massive orgy of torn limbs, decapitated heads, and splattered blood. Some of the action is pretty decent, but the filmmakers waste too much time in trying to make us care about characters that are paper thin. Dafoe seems to be the only actor who understands how goofy the movie is and acts accordingly. They should have just made the film with him as the central character and turned it into a wall-to-wall action flick.

Rating: * ½

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead - Dir. Sidney Lumet (2007)

Modern day Greek tragedy. A return to form for Lumet.

Tangled web of lies and deceit builds to a life-shattering crescendo of desperation and murder.

Naked Marisa Tomei? YAY! Naked Philip Seymour Hoffman? BOO!