Film reviews: Everybody Has A Plan | The Purge | The Big Wedding

Viggo Mortensen plays identical twin brothers in Ana Piterbarg’s opaque thriller. Viggo 1 is an indistinctly unhappy doctor working in Buenos Aires who gets a visit from Viggo 2, a terminally ill, beekeeping petty criminal.

Everybody Has A Plan (15)

* * *

Dr Viggo seizes the chance for a life swap, then discovers his backwoods sibling was involved in a recent murder. The tools are here for a great atmospheric noir, but although Viggo broods terrifically, the film is a little underwhelming in the plot and plan department.

On selected release.

The Purge (15)

* *

In this horror about a futuristic society, one night of legalised violent crime is allowed each year. Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey head up a family who assume they are safe behind a high-tech security system until they are threatened by home invaders. Writer-director James DeMonaco’s dim nihilism (apparently criminal acts are never spontaneous) is both tenuous and tedious.

On general release from Friday

The Big Wedding (15)

* *

A long-divorced couple (Robert De Niro and Diane Keaton) are forced to fake a display of togetherness in order to avoid upsetting their adopted son’s birth mother on his wedding day.

Think that sounds a bit old as a set-up? The film also borrows actors and their most familiar tropes: Keaton is daffy, Robin Williams cracks wise as an irreverent priest, Katherine Heigl is whiny and mamma mia – Amanda Seyfried is a bride-to-be again. And the something blue is provided by Robert De Niro’s priapic sculptor and a sexually liberated nymphette (Ana Ayora) who keeps pawing Keaton’s virginal son (Topher Grace).

Writer-director Justin Zackham’s clumsy farce strains to portray love and sex as complicated right across the generations; but the real message is that the Viagra crowd have to put up with crap comedies too.

On general release from Wednesday.