The Purge is a horror film with a cool premise that fails to execute said premise very well. It feels like a very, very, very trashy and tacky version of the excellent Straw Dogs films. In other words...it's a typical home invasion film that stole 90 minutes of my life. It's so boring and tedious that after a while---you check your watch and realize you're only 20 minutes into the film. Sure...there's a lot of action in the film but it's not suspenseful and it's certainly not well done.
The premise is simple but does *try to* provoke the question of "what if this premise were real?" It goes like this---one night a week for 12 hours, all crime is legal. This means anyone can kill anyone they want and do anything else they want. Mainly, though, the night is focused on killing. While most people take it as a time to get their anger out...an upper class family (Ethan Hawke, Lena Headey, Max Burkholder and Adelaide Kane) just stay sealed up in their house with high tech security backing them up. However, on this particular purge...the son lets in a man (Edwin Hodge) who is bleeding profusely. It turns out that this man is the target of someone else's purge. This someone else is a group of creepy, masked strangers led by an unmasked man (Rhys Wakefield) and they want him back.
As I said---the film did have a good amount of action but that never amounted to anything. With such a potentially realistic premise...you would think the film would take a lot of chances. On the contrary, just like the family...it stays locked up because it doesn't feel the need to take any chances. We're supposed to root for this family the entire time but how can we when they're such morons? They do everything wrong and are asking to get killed. Also...the masks are a cool premise at first but then become tiresome as the film relies too heavily on the creepiness of said masks.
The overall vibe of the film is weird and not in a good way. It's such an icky film that I actually had to take a shower when I got home. I don't mind gruesome violence if there's something to it such as in Straw Dogs. Here, however...there's no real reason to have people's head smashed in glass, people stabbed constantly, ETC. The acting is actually decent. Hawke and Headey both manage to make their fear realistic. Burkholder and Kane as the children do the same. Hodge makes it convincing that he just wants out and Wakefield is the ideal mix of creepy and unpredictable as the head villain. However, The Purge is too strange and clueless for its own good and does not make a convincing argument that purges are a thing of the future.
(1 out of 5 Stars, The film is rated R for strong disturbing violence and some language)
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