Movie Review: The Purge

We should have known better than to get our hopes up. We really should have.

By Eoghan Doherty

After seeing the excellent trailer for The Purge earlier this year, we were excited about seeing the film. Very excited.

The brilliant premise alone had us hooked. The year is 2022 and, under the ruling of the United States New Founding Fathers, the Government has sanctioned an event known as The Purge – one cathartic night in the year when all crime, including murder, is legal and emergency services are completlely suspended.

Told you.

As a result, unemployment, crime and poverty are at an all-time low as disgruntled workers can hunt down their horrible bosses, society as whole has an opportunity to wipe out the sick and needy and, most importantly, you’re allowed to take out that annoying person who skips the queue at the ATM all the time.

Romantic comedy it ain’t.

We follow one seemingly happy and well-to-do family, the Sandins, as they settle in for the night to watch coverage of the event on their Purge Feed. They’re safe in the comfort of their beautiful home and even safer in the knowledge that their state-of-the-art security system will protect them – it’s their perfect Purge plan.

Or so they think. Dum dum duuuummmmmm...

As dad James (Ethan Hawke) and mam Mary (Lena Headey) believe they have everything under control, little do they know that moody teenage daughter Zoey (Adelaide Kane) is hiding her trigger-happy boyfriend (both in the hornball and the gun sense) upstairs, while youngest son Charlie (Max Burkholder), goes one step further by turning off the security system and letting a helpless homeless man into the house.

Damn you Charlie, you silly boy with your morals and your desire to do good towards defenceless human beings. The d**k.

Intent on offing this specific lone stranger though, are a group of murderous, upper-class students who believe that it is their “right to Purge,” and are willing to do anything to get their hands on their victim, even if it means killing James and all of his family first. Led by Home and Away’s over-the-top Rhys Wakefield, this band of violent spoilt brats come complete with machetes, impeccable manners and some freaky-deaky masks.

Unfortunately, after setting up the incredibly interesting premise perfectly, the rest of the film doesn’t really live up to expectations.

Director James DeMonaco falls into the trap of employing the over-used cliches of home-invasion thrillers, and supernatural scare tactics are crowbarred into a non-supernatural film that really didn’t need them in the first place.

Creepy dolls and freaky ladies in flowing white dresses pop out when you most expect them and, for all their talk and grand speeches of sticking together, the Sandin family seem to split up at every available opportunity, ensuring that it’s much easier for their attackers to try and off them.

As a result, The Purge becomes a much less interesting film and any tension that it initially promised quickly evaporates.

We’re mainly going to blame Blumhouse Productions for this. They’re the people behind the low budget, high quality (technically at least) films like Sinister, Insidious and a number of the Paranormal Activity films that we all paid millions and gazillions of our hard-earned cash to see, only to be inevitably disappointed time and time again.

Unfortunately their budgets are so low that it must mean they’re not spending any money on hiring decent scriptwriters.

BOOOOOOOMMM.

Here’s hoping though that this premise might find a better home at some stage in the future and possibly be remade, even as a short film. That way we might find out what happened in the intervening years between 2013 and 2022,  we may work out why society’s morals have gone out the window and we might, just might, figure out how Ethan Hawke keeps getting work.

The Purge - what could have been an excellent film just isn’t executed well (unlike some of the victims along the way).