The Purge

The Purge transpires in an America where its citizens are allowed to commit any crime they’d like on one night a year, with the film following Ethan Hawke’s James, Lena Headey’s Mary, and their two kids (Max Burkholder’s Charlie and Adelaide Kane’s Zoey) as they attempt to survive an attack orchestrated by a nameless (and impressively smug) figure known only as Polite Leader (Rhys Wakefield). It’s a rather ludicrous premise that’s employed to persistently underwhelming effect by writer/director James DeMonaco, which is disappointing, certainly, given the better-than-expected nature of the movie’s opening half hour or so. DeMonaco pushes past the implausible setup by emphasizing the central characters and their (seemingly) fortified estate, with the watchable feel perpetuated by Hawke’s typically solid work and an overall atmosphere of ominous foreboding. The Purge, then, doesn’t begin to go downhill until the aforementioned Polite Leader and his gang of masked killers arrive on the scene, as the movie essentially abandons its (admittedly weak) premise and morphs into a particularly generic and run-of-the-mill home-invasion thriller. The film’s incredibly tedious vibe is exacerbated by the almost uniformly stupid actions of its central characters, with, especially, the laughable behavior of Burkholder’s Charlie stretching the limits of credibility on an ongoing basis (ie the kid, time and again, chooses a homeless individual over his own family). The ineffectiveness of the various action sequences (ie DeMonaco’s overuse of handheld camerawork renders such moments incoherent) confirms The Purge‘s place as a misbegotten piece of work, and it does seem as though the home-invasion genre has worn out its welcome to a decidedly palpable degree.

** out of ****