The Purge - ★
WARNING: This review contains spoilers.
This is without a doubt the worst film I have seen thus far in 2013.
If that is enough of a review to turn you away from this film, great. If you’d like to continue reading my more-rant-than-review analysis to see just what is so wrong with this piece of crap, continue reading.
The premise is fascinating, no doubt: unemployment is at 1%, the economy is booming, and there is zero crime except for one night a year when everything including murder is legal for 12 hours. Sounds scary, intense, and thrilling, right? Right. Director James DeMonaco handles his own script really well and executes this interesting premise in a great way, right? So, so, so wrong.
We get a generic American family, with an awkward younger son, an emotionally unstable teenage daughter, a stay-at-home mom, and a highly successful father whose top priority, on the surface, is his career, all nice and good. Now, before we get into the infuriating spark that lights the entire movie, let’s understand one thing: you don’t interfere in other people’s purging, okay? Okay.
Now the review gets fun.
What does little Charlie Sandin do when he sees a blood-stained man running from, clearly, his purgers? He lets him in his family’s locked down house. Forget the safety of your family, save the random stranger, please do! Please forsake the lives of your mom, your dad, and your somewhat hot sister because clearly you are Captain freaking America and not an awkward teenage boy who builds stupid creepy robot things!
Oh, but then it gets better! See, somewhat hot Zoe Sandin is, of course, spoiled up her butt, so she doesn’t care that her father goes to these great lengths to keep his family safe - she is going to keep making out with her older boyfriend, and even willingly offer him sex even though he doesn’t want it! Then, when this older boyfriend decides to trick her into thinking he wants to talk to her dad about letting him see her, but really just wants to kill her dad, she tends to him even though the little d-bag shot at her dad!
How could this possibly get any more cringing to watch? Well, then we get the talented, and very creepy Rhys Wakefield show up as the “Polite Leader”, demanding the Sandin’s hand over “Bloody Stranger”, and no one needs to get hurt. Of course, Papa Sandin is all for saving his family, but increasingly annoying Charlie is not okay with that one bit! Even Zoe questions her father for his actions, and eventually, Mama Sandin snaps, too. So, what is Papa Sandin left to do but give in and say, “okay, let’s not hand over one man we aren’t going to kill ourselves so we can be safe - instead, let’s just get all our guns out and kill these ten or so folks instead”, right?
After totally kicking ass, and keeping true to his word about wanting to keep his family safe, and killing five of the purgers, Polite Leader gets the upperhand and incapacitates James (Papa) Sandin. All hope is now lost because the one person who actually gave a crap about his family’s wellbeing is now out of the game. Cue Mary (Mama) Sandin getting attacked before being “rescued” by her neighbors, only to be told they wanted to kill her family themselves. Add a generic surprise rescue by Bloody Stranger, and then we reach what is easily second to Charlie’s uselessness in terms of frustration:
Mary refuses to kill the people that just tied her and her kids up and were going to kill them. Are you freaking SERIOUS? The nose-breaking of the neighbor purgers’ leader isn’t nearly satisfying, and, in the end, you wonder what DeMonaco was thinking by letting the one character who we wanted to live die, and the ones that should have died live - you are not George R. R. Martin, sir.
On that note, it’s incredible that after learning to do nothing but hate Lena Headey (more fairly, Cersei Lannister), she actually sells the whole loving mother thing very well. At least, until she decides to let her childrens’ captors go back to their lives in peace. I assure you my mother, nor any of yours that actually love you, would have let such a thing happen, and would have easily risked the disappointment of any one deity to protect her kids.
At the end of the film, if you don’t wish the purge was an actual thing just for one year, or that you could enter the reality of the film, and kill Charlie Sandin yourself, you clearly were not raised in a loving family. The moral, the lesson, the family DeMonaco chose to focus on was all poor. In a family that actually cared for one another, actually was prepared to sacrifice for each other, as James Sandin was alone in, The Purge would have had the characters it needed to stand strong; however, there’s nothing amusing or applaudable about a film that promotes forsaking your own flesh and blood for a stranger, nothing at all. I feel pity for any family that could birth and raise such idiots.
Quote of the film: “Was his life really worth yours? Your family’s?” - Polite Leader
