Particle Guy

Cut and paste villain redemption plot meets pre-teen angst in a redundant, lazily written, and overused plot. Tremendous work clearly went into this production and I can salute the hard work that surely contributed to this film, but I have very few positive takeaways from watching it. There was some smooth acrobatic camera work which was well executed, including one especially impressive single take shot that was incredibly satisfying. Emma stone also did a remarkable job capturing the mannerisms and nature of cruella. Emma Thompson did a great job as well. And the costume work is possibly oscar worthy. Other than that, if felt like a cliche, plot-hole-riddled, villain rememption movie that failed to redeem the villain, leaving much to be desired. The hyper-modernized dialogue set in the 60's-70's is noticeable, but fairly common for Disney and doesn't take away from the movie. It appears to be marketed towards a young audience, and perhaps tween viewers would enjoy it the most. The movie (perhaps because of it's apparent target audience) attempts to paint a somewhat overarching positive message...which in the vain of the plot becomes a half baked swing-and-a-miss at a female empowerment story. It attempts to be brash and bold, while coming across as juvenile angst. A fitting poster slogan could've easily been 'It's not a phase, mom'. The overall predictability, incosistency, and redundancy of the plot do a disservice to the parts of the movie that were genuinly well executed.

First off, I'm not bothered by this movie having a political undertone (or overtone rather), as the concept of the purge is somewhat political by nature; I am, however, bothered by the putrid, indolent, and cliche writing of said political overtone. Granted, that level of writing was quite on par with the rest of the movie....which seemed to drag on for ages yet never cover any ground. (This is one of the few movies that has had me repeatedly checking the time to see if it was finally wrapping up.) The plot suffered the essence of a middle schoolers attempt at political commentary. A uni-dimensional idea dragged out for hours. Midway through the movie I came to the conculsion 'Oh, maybe this isn't a scary movie, just an action movie'....I then saw it labeled 'horror' online and became even more dissapointed with the film. The scariest part of the movie was a 'jumpscare' in the first scene that's merely a quick shot of a characters son...the only thing scary about it was that it was for some reason accompanied by a loud shrieking sound for no reason at all...And that pretty much sets the bar for the level of 'horror' in this movie. Don't get me wrong, I can sit through the irony of 'eat the rich' movies made by multi-millionairs....but it's much more tolerable when said movie is anything but boring, cliched, redundant, and juvenilely angsty (which unfortunately are the descriptions most evidently fitting for this installment of the purge franchise.) I try to include possitive feedback in reviews, but this movie honestly didn't leave much room for that. For those who like horror, it isn't scary. For those who like action, it's linear, plain, and uninteresting. For those who like plot, there isn't any. For those who like good movies, go see something else.