» The Purge Review: Killing an Interesting Concept

“When a stranger gets inside James Sandin’s (Ethan Hawke) house during the yearly lockdown known as “the purge”, starts a sequence of events that threatens to tear a family apart. Now, it is up to James, his wife Mary (Lena Headey), and their kids to make it through the night without turning into the monsters from whom they hide.”

Like any piece of speculative fiction, the premise of “The Purge” asks the audience “What if…?”. In this case: What would happen if modern society made all crimes legal for one night a year? The movie answers this question with two big thumbs up: People would control their demons 364 days a year which in turn would result in crime and unemployment -somehow- at a record low.

It is key that you accept this set-up, but the film does a poor job selling it. It starts by saying that in less than a decade we won’t only automatically prosper by means of allowing acts of savagery 12 hours each year, but also, that we will all embrace it as a festivity worth of celebration. If people who grew up in our time had no problems dropping their values overnight through “auto-brainwashing”, how on Earth a kid raised to love a tradition will reject it this much?

The anti-right wing messages are so heavy handed that characters are close to wear a banner on their chest stating what they represent. The villain -played with ferocity by a promising Tony Oller- is an American psycho more perturbed than the kids in Funny Games. He is a cold member of the 1% elite that enjoys exterminating the poor, specially if they belong to a minority. If rich people are bad, highly educated rich people are demonic fascists.

His friends are a different cliché, behaving like crazy members of a cult, or a twisted family like in The Strangers. They enter a home with armed people in it and start playing around like if they were mentally challenged. Instead of frightening killers they come across like a bunch of spoiled college jerks on drugs. All horror movies need a degree of stupidity, but here both “villains” and “heroes” go the extra mile.

Their illogical behavior and sprint of bad decisions would be easier to swallow if you were at the edge of your seat all the time. But James DeMonaco proves that switching writing with directing duties, and vice versa, is harder than it sounds. Let’s pretend that when the home invasion starts we cared about these people. What would be simpler than creating suspense and genuine scares in a poorly lit house infested with blood-thirsty masked people? Instead, you get unintentionally funny movies.

But his biggest crime (one that film society may not forgive) is to make amazing actors look bad. Both Ethan Hawke and Lena Heady try to survive their own purge, with a nonsensical script that creates ridiculous situations and demands over the top performances. Their characters become annoying to the point that by the end of the movie, if asked, we would gladly extend our hand and give our thumb down in approval of them being purged.

One cool fight scene in a recreational room is the best reward excited movie goers will receive from a movie that shouldn’t have been allowed to be out in theaters. Not even for 12 hours.

The Purge is in theaters since June 7th.