The Purge

This guileless, sensationalist, hypocritical and overall very tedious film took great pride in raising interesting moral questions and then doing absolutely nothing to answer them. About the only thing that impressed me was realising how much work they clearly do to make Lena Headey look so glamorous and stiff in Game of Thrones when here she looks so nice-normal-mother-of-two.

Ripping off that old ‘Red Hour’ episode of Star Trek (though at least giving a decent explanation), the premise is in the near future, the financial crisis got so bad that American society broke down, and the only way that the ‘new Founding Fathers’ could bring back stability and order was to introduce a 12-hour annual ‘purge’, in which all crimes are made legal.

It’s quite clear that some studio exec beefed up the tagline with ‘all crimes’, though, as it is obviously only assault and murder that are legalised. This is hinted at when a recorded voice states only weapons of a certain class and under are permitted, and after all you don’t see mass fraud, no kids are abused, no drugs are taken, nobody marries multiple spouses and no movie collections are downloaded – at least onscreen. For twelve hours, basically gangs are allowed to roam the streets with guns and knives and attack whoever they find, or one another.

The moral dilemma that the script pays most attention to is the social divide this necessarily causes – the rich buy security systems for their homes and stock up on guns, while the poor become the targets of hunts as those inclined to murder frame it as improving society – culling those who do not contribute so that society as a whole is left with those who contribute. This goes a little way to explaining why mostly people go out ‘hunting’ with just a few weapons and possibly scary masks, rather than body armour or weaponized vehicles, and nobody has minigun barracks added to their homes, which would have been very sensible for our protagonists here – rather than attacking one another, mostly the people in this dystopia apparently prey on the weak.

This, along with two other events, forms the impetus for the action here. Pure-hearted little twelve-year-old boy sees a homeless black guy getting chased and pleading for help, so lets him into the central family’s armoured home, leading a mob of privileged thrill-seekers to lay siege to them unless the uncooperative homeless guy is given up to them. Of course, enjoying their legal killing and being creepy and rich makes them morally okay to kill, closely following the Hollywood rules, and little kiddy doesn’t have to deal with the fact that his act of mercy leaves many, many people dead including one very close to him, because that would be a little too complex an issue for this film.

The other two things that spark the action are the teenaged daughter character’s boyfriend deciding the best way for the family to accept him is to kill his girlfriend’s father, which of course goes wrong and ends up a plot that goes absolutely nowhere and feels so extraneous it felt like it had to come back in some form later – but doesn’t. And then the ridiculously obviously signposted intervention of the neighbours, whose timing is nonsensical but who at least provide an amusingly absurd closing scene.

The long and short of it is that the central idea is too absurd to really work, the execution is so limited as to feel like a total waste, and the moral questions raised only get vaguely touched at – barely even scratched. The horribly obvious scriptwriting, the over-the-top bad-guy acting, the cheap attempts at horror-style jumps and the uninteresting characters make this feel like a bad episode of a television series, and not even close to the quality a feature film should have.