The Purge (2013) **/*****
For basically just being a simple home invasion thriller, The Purge is built on a pretty out there conceit. The story is set just nine years in the future, but it’s set in an America that has changed so drastically that there is now a yearly holiday wherein anything is legal for twelve hours: including murder. Some say it was implemented for high-minded sociological reasons, as a sort of pressure valve meant to regulate our anger and aggression. Other people claim that its purpose is to thin the heard and rid us of our poor huddled masses. Whatever your politics, the reality of “The Purge” is that it means normal folk are forced to barricade themselves behind beefed up security systems during the period of purging.
Our protagonists are just such a family. As a matter of fact, the father (Ethan Hawke) is one of the entrepreneurs who have made fortunes selling the beefed up security systems. As we meet him, he and is wife (Lena Headey) and children (Max Burkholder and Adelaide Kane) are getting ready to lock down their house for another night of weathering the annual murderous storm, but, of course, things don’t go quite according to plan. If they did, we wouldn’t have much of a movie. To reveal the details of what happens would rob the film of some of its tension, but it’s probably no surprise to say that some people with bad intentions get inside their fortress of a house, and a struggle for survival follows.
On a whole, The Purge isn’t a movie that works very well, and the biggest reason that’s the case is that the Purge just doesn’t make any sense as an concept. The idea that a night of unchecked, murderous aggression would be a cathartic thing that eliminates crime and poverty just doesn’t hold any water whatsoever. The idea that everyday, normal people would be convinced to mindlessly sign off on a policy that’s designed to rid the world of the sick and poor doesn’t either (especially in a world that’s only supposed to be nine years in the future). The problem isn’t even that the Purge is unbelievable, or that the movie spends too much time trying to explain it away — which it does — it’s that the screenplay by writer/director James DeMonaco attempts to mine the conceit of far too many truths and dramatic epiphanies, and when you’re dealing with an idea as stupid as a night where killing is decriminalized in an otherwise sane society, the results are pretty embarrassing, both for the movie and for the viewer. You can’t have sensible, good-hearted people come to the eye-opening realization that legalized murder and violence is a bad idea three-fourths of the way through a film without it playing as laughable idiocy.
Where the movie does excel is in a brief period during its third act when all of the talk, all of the hand-wringing, and all of the horror movie scare tactics fall away and it turns into big, stupid, mindless violence. Just when you start to have a little bit of fun, it goes back to trying to preach laughable messages to you though, so the popcorn violence isn’t able to add up to much. The Purge also never reaches its potential because its villains aren’t in the least bit threatening. Hawke and Headey are just fine as the protagonists, but everyone playing the bad guys (especially the main antagonist, Rhys Wakefield) are so over the top in their ridiculous portrayals of a bloodthirsty populace that your reaction is to laugh at their nerdiness rather than to fear for those who they’re threatening’s safety.
And even on the other side of things, the protagonists aren’t that great either. While Hawke and Headey, and to a degree the actors playing their children, are all capable enough considering what they’re given, the plot’s progression and the action sequences’ tension are much too reliant on their characters’ abject stupidity for you to truly care when they’re put in peril. Forget the fact that they have to be convinced that murder is immoral, these are characters who are so rock stupid they refuse to even go into a sneaking position or a crouch when they’re walking around a pitch black house that’s full of people who want to kill them. Instead of utilizing the fact that their eyes are better adjusted to the dark than their attackers, when people start coming through the windows they shine around flashlights and give away their positions. All the dumbness leads to your having a bloodthirsty reaction to the violence, wherein you want to see the stupid people get gutted, and that’s pretty much the opposite of the mindset all the preaching is trying to sell you.
This gap between The Purge’s intentions and what it’s able to accomplish makes for a good boiling down of why it’s mostly a failure. While it has enough jump scares and moments of crazy violence to be a crowd pleaser in some respects, its tone is too all over the place for it to really resonate with anyone. If it was just a dumb movie about a dumb made up holiday set in a dumb future world, and it was all a flimsy excuse to shoot scenes of haunted house movie tension mixed with scenes of revenge movie violence, then it might have succeeded as being dumb fun. But it’s constantly throwing fun out the window to try to shoot for real insight and real intrigue, and it completely falls on its face every time it attempts to be anything other than exploitation. After a while all of the failure just gets painful to watch, no matter how much you want to give the potential that was there the benefit of the doubt.
