The Man Cave scene: I'm going to start with one scene in the movie that I thought was freaking awesome. At one point in the movie the bad guys start breaking into the main characters house. Ethan Hawke goes down to his Man Cave, a collection of pinball games, pool tables, and various other Man things. So Ethan goes down into his Man Cave and fights three guys in Strangers masks with the contents of his Man Cave. This scene is amazingly stupid, doesn't flow with the tone of the rest of the film as its more focused on action. But this scene rocks. It is amazingly fun to just watch Ethan Hawke kill yuppies with a pinball machine, it just is.
Terrible character stupidity: One of the worst problems a horror movie can have is to have its characters make bad decisions. If your character acts stupid then it takes your audience out of the film and makes them less likely to be scared by it. This is one of the problems that absolutely destroys The Purge. Ethan Hawke has numerous chances to try and reason with the crazed maniacs outside, and try to get more time to give them what they want, and he never does. The villains also do this quite frequently, they never seem to do very thorough checks of the house to make sure that no one is still lurking about, and it gets them killed, a lot.
The Directing: Okay to once again stem the flow of hatred I do like the direction here. Shots during the scenes of characters wandering through the house are tight on the characters. It gives a sense of claustrophobia to the audience, as it restricts their field of vision down to something similar to the characters themselves. This would make the film very scary, even during jump scares if it weren't for one tiny little problem.
Predictability: This is one of the most predictable horror films ever made. Now just because an audience guesses that certain items in the background are going to be important later doesn't automatically become a knock on your film. What you are supposed to do in that situation is upend the audiences expectations, and use the item in a more interesting way. Once in the entire film does this happen, only once. In regards to one of the numerous foreshadowed items during the films overly winking first act, only one. Everything else plays out exactly as you would expect, right down to the final villains for the films "subversive" climax. But considering the films premise I think that the thing that pisses me off more is...
Complete lack of ambiguity: This is a film with a bunch of potential. The idea that once a year all crime is legal for 12 hours, allows for a number of different stories. The problem is that the movie doesn't have the balls to go to the dark places that a premise like this allows. The villains, even the final ones, are completely irredeemable monsters. They treat the homeless veteran that they are pursuing as nothing but a "swine" in their words. This makes it perfectly okay for you to root for Ethan Hawke to kill them. Hawke sells security for people during The Purge, so he's "part of the problem" and needs to be taught the error of his ways. The whole film is littered with pieces of 1% revenge material, especially in the films ending, which I won't spoil, which takes this to the only moments that feel like they live up to the premises promise.
This is the true killing blow for The Purge, how naively it perceives its own world. The overly predictable screenplay, the obnoxiously stupid characters, the constant foreshadowing in the prelude, much of it could be forgiven if the movie explored some of the themes that it brings up. The potential for economic stagnation in a world that kills off poorer and noncontributing members to society. The political motivations, or even party, of The New Founding Fathers. The parts of the country where the reverse to what we see in the film would be true. Places where the poor would rise up against the richer, or at least attempt to. The implications that The New Founding Fathers are the ones keeping The Purge around. What would happen if they were voted out? Are there now Pro-Purge and Non-Purge parties, again which ones? The film answers none of these questions, because it only sees things in black and white, and that is its real problem.
Conclusion: I wanted to like The Purge. It has an amazing premise that I want to see another movie use properly. It has some really fun moments, and some pretty good acting. It shows promise in certain things, like not focusing in on the homeless mans dog tags to try and evoke sympathy. But in the end the movie is too stupid to live up to its own potential.
2/5
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