The Purge: Defined as What Users Will Do with Their Lunch After Viewing This Film

Director James DeMonaco has attempted to lock into our deepest geo-political fears, revisiting the modern day version of a story that has been told for decades.  A poor, patch-work clone of such famous tales as Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” or Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas”, The Purge is a disappointment on almost every level.

Premise: America its citizens murder each other for one night a year and things go wrong for the Sandin family, putting them in mortal danger. Result: Too much was attempted with much too little accomplished as this film crashes and burns well before it thankfully ends.

Our ill-fated film begins with televised gruesome acts of ever-heightening violence depicting bludgeoning, stabbing, shootings, and so forth, establishing the film’s premise of endemic calamity. There is also randomized commentary, sound bites echoing amidst the horror referencing the “American Purge”, the “New Founding Fathers” and debating the merits of the new social order.

The Purge is basically a time when all laws are suspended for twelve hours so people can “purge” themselves of all hateful feelings once a year and thus maintain social balance for the rest of the year.

We are then thrust into the tranquility of cradled suburbia as everyone calmly prepares for the imminent purge.  Blue flowers, plastic smiles and high fences set the stage for a community languidly reeling for the inevitable.

Amidst the false serenity is James Sandin (Ethan Hawke), a member of the community and also the man responsible for selling that same community a record number of security systems used during the Purge.  This fact is painfully highlighted as his wife Mary (Lena Headey) is all but assaulted by neighbor Grace Ferrin (Arija Bareikis) in one of the laziest acts of foreshadowing in modern film.

Worse still is the cliché antics of love-stricken daughter Zoey (Adelaide Kane), her older boyfriend Henry (Tony Oller) and the weirdo son Charlie (Max Burkholder) who views the world via an eerie, burnt doll mounted on a toy tank.  Each scene is sloppily thrown together as DeMonaco hurries us along like a carnival barker through the Hall of Oddities, providing glimpses but not enough to invest any real interest.

After a few scenes that ultimately illustrate the reluctance of the Sandin family to undergo the Purge and calling flagrantly into question the morality of this forced utilitarianism, even asserting that The Purge works because it basically eradicates the poor.

There is admittedly an eerie calm that falls over the residents and the film as the countdown to the purge takes place, as it all sinks in.  However, what ensues is nothing more than a series of messy, confusing violent events that are strung together in a dime-store budget script.

There is a man targeted (Edwin Hodge) by Purge participants whose pleas for help move young Charlie to open the doors and let him in.  This, and other events, ultimately cause considerable chaos within the Sandin home, including the appearance of a band of Purge participants who have used this time as an excuse to become a cult of vicious, rabid bacchanalians.

Led by a man who most closely resembles The Omen (Rhys Wakefield), this pseudo cult terrorizes the family amidst truly preposterous scenes of morbid debauchery and some dialogue as hollow as a discarded conch.

The rest of the film is a whirlwind of nonsense, where audiences are subjected to the Sandin nightmare as it plays out in a messy, bloody version of Home Alone meets The Strangers meets a Mystery Science Theater victim.  Every moment is either painfully predictable or completely unintelligible.  Despite the screams, audiences may have trouble keeping their eyes open, much less focused on the screen.

The acting in the film is fair.  Hawke’s performance is expected but sadly his character gets in the way of his talent and his role never holds interest (see him in Sinister instead). Headey is strong throughout although, once again, the character as it stands in the film never really reaches heroine, vaguely piquing interest. Burkholder and Kane are sturdy in this film for the own parts, and due to the demanding nature of their roles may even rise above.  Everyone else is suffocated by the flimsy script, languishing as laughable characters rather than true characters immersed in a horror film.

Overall, this film is an incoherent, incomplete mess that borrows from past greatness and collapses completely under the weight. While there is a sense that the film will fail to live up to promise early on, it is only once audiences are confronted by the sheer lack of depth and coherence in the plot that the true horror will surface.  And with a  hackneyed, insufferable resolution that lands the final agonizing blow The Purge inadvertently lives up to its name: stay away from the bathroom, there may be a line.

Rating: 4 – A case of PBR and a “Dear John” letter