We live in a weird society. It seems like you can't go a few months without hearing about a wannabe terrorist leaving a homemade bomb in a crowd, or some lunatic barging into an elementary school or a movie theater with a machine gun and racking up a double-digit body count. Events like these and the oversaturation of media coverage have an effect on people, which ends up being evidenced in pop culture. Take, for example, the new movie The Purge. Its basic concept tries awfully hard to feel timely and relevant considering just how crazy things have been lately, but it ends up hitting a brick wall at 100 miles an hour.
Within the next few years, the United States will come under the control of an organization known as the New Founding Fathers of America. After their installation, the New Founding Fathers instituted "The Purge," an annual program meant to allow a catharsis, so people can vent all their dark fantasies and negative emotions. During the 12-hour period that the Purge is in effect, all crime ― up to and including murder ― is absolutely legal, while all emergency services are temporarily suspended. No cops, no firefighters, no paramedics, no help. And the Purge has actually been successful too, as America has actually prospered, with violent crime and unemployment at all-time lows.
As the movie begins, we're introduced to James Sandin (Ethan Hawke), a home security salesman who's made a fortune by exploiting his customers' fears of the Purge and selling them security systems that turn their homes into veritable fortresses. With this year's Purge about to commence, James corrals his family into their suburban home and activates their security system. But just as the Sandin family begins to settle in for what they'd hoped would be a relatively safe evening of simply watching Purge coverage on television, a battered and bloodied man (Edwin Hodge) runs by the house, begging for help. James's young son Charlie (Max Burkholder), unable to ignore the man's pleas, quickly unlocks the front door and lets him in.
The stranger's presence immediately throws everything into disarray. It turns out he was being hunted by a gang of masked hooligans who are bound and determined to kill him. The gang's leader (Rhys Wakefield) politely requests that the stranger be turned over to them, but when his request is denied, he and his gang choose to simply break in and take him by force. The Sandin family is faced with no options but to defend their home by any means necessary.
The Purge is unfortunately one of those movies that has an intriguing concept yet lacks something in the execution. It's not a tremendously bad movie or anything, but it didn't bring much to the table that I hadn't already seen before. The movie honestly plays out like your standard home invasion thriller. It hits pretty much all the same notes, a lot of the same tired tropes and clichés that you'd come to expect from such a movie. This ends up making it sadly predictable at times, which hurts the movie's effectiveness more than a little bit.
The movie was written and directed by James DeMonaco, whose efforts on both fronts are a mixed bag. As far as his direction goes, it's... okay, I guess. There's a few sequences that I thought were pretty good, but for most of the movie, he's doing just enough to get by. DeMonaco plays a lot of the home invasion thriller clichés straight, which did more harm than good. If he'd deviated from those clichés and played with the audience's expectations, it might not have been too bad a flick. But if you can see a lot of it coming a mile away, then what's the point?
But while DeMonaco's direction is still relatively serviceable, his script could have used a wee bit more work. The characters are poorly written for starters, with the kids being of especially little consequence. They actually disappear for long stretches, with only the son making any sort of real contribution to the movie at any given time. That's more than I can say for the stranger who the son lets into the house, who has maybe two scenes in the whole thing before the climax. I understand that the Sandins not knowing where he's at and trying to find him is the main gist of the plot, but you'd think DeMonaco would have at least given him something to do.
And DeMonaco could have eliminated the entire concept of the Purge altogether and it wouldn't have affected the movie much. It could have played out like that movie The Strangers and had the gang attacking the Sandins just for fun. Instead, it turns the movie into a weird amalgam of John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 and the Star Trek episode "The Return of the Archons" that's set in a well-to-do suburban neighborhood. The idea of the Purge and its sociological ramifications are something I would have liked seeing explored further. Who the hell thought it was a good idea to set this up? How did America ever agree to it in the first place? And how does it cause crime and unemployment to plummet? These are questions that DeMonaco barely ever addresses, and never comes even close to answering. He sets up the Purge to do some kind of social commentary, but fails to do anything with it. He just gets lost and trails off after a while.
DeMonaco could have done a lot more with the idea of the Purge than he actually does. We never really get any real sense of scale or scope regarding just how big the Purge gets. We're given the occasional hint through some brief expository dialogue and the occasional bit of stock footage repurposed to look like it came from security cameras during the Purges of years past, but we never see just how deep things run. We never see what kind of effect the Purge has on anyone outside of the Sandin home. We're told that it's totally changed the American landscape, but we never really see it. And that's one of the big problems with how DeMonaco brings his movie to life: he avoids the tried and true law of "show, don't tell." The movie's viral marketing websites show us more about the Purge than the movie ever even remotely thinks of doing, and even then, a tremendous amount is left to the audience's imaginations.
I'm also disappointed by how DeMonaco failed to get the movie's chance for social commentary off the ground. You create a world where one night of chaotic lawlessness every year actually has a beneficial effect on the country, and you don't explore anything with it? Surely you could make an entire movie based on the week up to and week after the Purge to show just how it affects and changes people. The moral and ethical ramifications of the Purge are worth investigating, and DeMonaco never comes close.
I also had mixed feelings about the cast, who are actually fairly unremarkable for the most part. Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey are good, but any actors could have played these parts. They don't do anything particularly noteworthy, which is unfortunate because I typically enjoy Hawke and Headey's work. They're at least better than Max Burkholder and Adelaide Kane, who play the kids. They're practically non-factors and don't contribute much at all to the movie. There are actually periods where you forget they're in the movie altogether. And the same can be said for Edwin Hodge, who only pops up in the movie once in a blue moon and isn't given much to do when he does.
But I will say that I really enjoyed Rhys Wakefield as the leader of the gang. He's guilty of some overacting, sure, but I thought Wakefield was effectively creepy more often than not. He carries himself with a charismatic swagger and gives off an air of menace that I thought was convincing. I really bought that he was kill anyone that stood between him and what he wants. For all the negative things I've said about The Purge, Wakefield is one of the positives.
And while I have indeed spent much of this review pointing out all of the places where I thought The Purge struggled, I still enjoyed the movie. It had some moments that I thought it pulled off well, and I thought the concept was intriguing despite all my complaints about how poorly I thought it was executed. It does just enough to justify seeing it once, perhaps renting it or catching the movie whenever it premieres on cable. The Purge might not have lived up to my expectations, but it's still worth checking out. And let's hope that by 2022, we've got hoverboards and flying DeLoreans instead of the Purge. I'd rather have a happy future.
Final Rating: **½
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