Cinemazlowski Some big films open this weekend: here's three reviews to help you pick

Jul 1, 2016

The 4th of July is of course a great time for fireworks, but it's also a great time to go and see movies. This summer hasn't been as good as recent ones for films, but there's a few fun ones out there. "Finding Dory" is fantastic for all ages, and "Central Intelligence" is easily the funniest movie of the summer and highly recommended for teens and adults.

This week, there are three new movies out, which I'll touch upon briefly for each:

There is perhaps no other filmmaker who has been more inspired by Walt Disney than Steven Spielberg. While he's mixed in adult historical dramas including "Schindler's List" and "Amistad," as well as intense thrillers such as "Minority Report," the man who did "E.T." has created dozens of movies the whole family can enjoy.

So it's surprising to find that he's never made a movie for Disney studios until now, nearly 50 years into his career. Unfortunately, his new film "The BFG" doesn't deliver the kind of magic one might hope for. It's tale of an orphan girl named Sophie (Ruby Barnhill) who is grabbed and then befriended by a Big Friendly Giant named Runt (Mark Rylance) before having to be rescued by him from other giants is nowhere near as compelling as it should be. It's family-friendly, but almost too gentle, offering no real spark for at least half its running time.

"The BFG" is based on a classic children's book by Roald Dahl, the famously cheeky British writer who delighted kids by slipping a mischievously witty streak into his tales such as "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." I haven't read the book, but it is almost stunning to experience how utterly boring the movie version of "The BFG" is in the first half. Aside from a spectacular sequence in which the giant captures Sophie and races across much of England to take her home (he's afraid that having seen him, she'll tell other humans about him and put him in danger), the film seems to slog through at least a half-hour of the girl and the giant largely sitting around his house talking as she learns about his life in Giant Country. 

It turns out that Runt is harassed by a group of even bigger giants who are child-eating cannibals who mock him for being a vegetarian. The story springs to some life when the Queen of England and her military forces step in to help root the mean giants out of Giant Country. Their mission is to keep them from scaring children in England, leading to a mix of whimsical comedy as Sophie encounters life among the royals and some humorous, mild action between humans and the giants.

One surprising aspect of the movie is that it has some elaborate fart jokes that almost need to be seen to be believed. Spielberg manages to walk the fine line of not making them utterly gross, but it feels kind of beneath his amazing skills to rely on that kind of humor for the movie's biggest laughs. But I'll admit that the packed house of kids at the advance screening I attended exploded in laughter when the people on screen passed gas.  

There are few movies with a more timely title than this one, seeing as how our two apparent presidential nominees – Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton – are extremely polarizing.  But this third entry in the intense "Purge" series of thrillers takes place about 20 years in the future, and reveals an America that's in even worse shape, although it offers some hope underneath its violent surface.

The "Purge" movies center around the idea that America eventually becomes so violent that its leaders create a special night once a year in which people can act on their wildest criminal impulses – even including murder – for 12 hours without any legal consequences. Each one of these films has become more ambitious in their scope, action set pieces and even in raising some important philosophical points about where the real-world, present-day America might be headed.

The new film, "The Purge: Election Year" picks up with the character Leo Barnes (Frank Grillo), who started the second movie, 2014's "The Purge: Anarchy," as a grieving father who wanted to kill as revenge for the tragic death of his own son in a prior Purge, but became a hero saving others instead. Now, he's a Secret Service agent protecting Senator Charlie Roan (Elizabeth Mitchell), whose family was killed before her eyes as a teenager 18 years before while she was helplessly bound and gagged. Now a Senator running for president, she has vowed to end the purge and restore decency and genuine law and order to society.

Meanwhile, the story also follows Joe Dixon (Mykelti Williamson), an African-American store owner who has a young Latino assistant named Marcos (Joseph Julian Sorra) and is threatened by black teenage girls who vow revenge for making them give back stolen candy. They have a friend named Laney Rucker (Betty Gabriel) who used to cause trouble but now drives an armored vehicle on Purge nights to help injured people get to secret medical care.

The main government leaders want to stop Charlie from being elected president, both due to their bloodlust and the desire to save money on helping the poor by letting the poor kill each other en masse during the Purge each year. Thus, Leo tries to save Charlie from a team of white supremacist commandos as well as other crooked agents, and once they flee her attempted assassins and hit the streets of Washington, DC, they then have to contend with vicious random criminals.

But eventually, they cross paths with Joe and his friends, creating unlikely alliances and cross-class and cross-racial understanding in a desperate attempt to stay alive and bring the Purge's leaders down for good and the good of society.

"The Purge: Election Year" is very dark and violent in places, although it keeps some of the worst violence offscreen and implied. It also has an unfortunate tendency to use PC stereotypes that make rich white people all look like they are blood-lusting evil people who want to use the Purge for nefarious political ends.

However, this fast-paced and well-written thriller is entertaining on its action-level terms and has many positives as well, particularly in showing statues of Christ as a man and as a baby at key moments of grace in the finale and in Charlie's strongly worded message of forgiveness towards the evil leaders – insisting that people vote them out of office rather than kill them in revenge.

Overall, this is an exciting movie that is also thought-provoking, but it is not for the faint of heart. "The Purge: Election Year" is definitely aimed at adults, and can be enjoyed with extreme caution by those who can handle strong violence and language.

Finally, "The Legend of Tarzan" is aimed at the teen and adult audience, and plays like the recent live-action version of "The Jungle Book," only with adults. Alexander Skarsgard plays the title hero, who is a British nobleman in the 1840s who was largely raised by apes after his parents were killed while working in Africa when he was a baby.

Now married and seemingly refined, he gets sent into Africa to help find out why a Belgian king is rounding up natives as slaves for a diamond mining operation. With an American mercenary named George Washington Williams (Samuel L. Jackson) in tow, he gets back in touch with his true, near-savage nature to save the natives and rescue his kidnapped wife Jane from the clutches of the Belgian expedition leader Leon Rom (Christoph Waltz).

The performances are solid in "Tarzan," and both the cinematography and groundbreaking special effects (not one animal in the movie is real) are astonishing. The only possible downside is that the plot is almost too smart in the beginning, with lengthy details about the cultural and historical forces at odds with each other. But there's plenty of jungle action to make this fun for most kids, as well as definitely teens and adults. The PG-13 rating is for its action violence as well as a bed scene of foreplay between a married couple in which the wife is clothed and the man is shirtless.