Movie Review: "The Purge"

The  biggest complaint many audiences have about The Purge (regardless of whether or not they've seen it) is that the plot "doesn't make sense." And to that I say: well, duh. The Purge is a film, not a documentary, and nobody involved with the film is asking the audience to take it as fact. Yes, there will never be a law that allows us to commit any crime during a twelve hour period without having to fear punishment. But there will also never be a law that would call for the slaughter of children to be televised for the entire nation, and I don't think anybody up in Washington is secretly assembling a team of superheroes to help fight crime. If The Purge was set in some fantastical dimension where the characters wore crazy costumes and drove hover cars, would ignorant critics still cry foul? So, no, I'm not going to tear apart the legitimacy of The Purge in this review. Sorry.

With that out of the way, let's get to the movie itself- The Purge is like a twisted episode of "The Twilight Zone" complete with social commentary, a handful of twists and an excessively creepy tone. Even before the masked villains featured prominently in the film's apparently effective advertising campaign emerge, the film manages to make the audience feel uncomfortable. Neighbors wear smiles that feel a bit too fake, almost resembling those on the aforementioned masks. Radio chatter on talking heads on the TV talk about whether or not the poor are deserving of the violence they experience on the night of the Purge due to their lack of worth in the moneymaking society that is America 2025. And characters watch men and women get killed in the most brutal of ways not in horror or in glee but in stoic, emotionless glances. Within minutes The Purge makes one thing clear: this is political commentary first and a horror movie second.

In the best of cases, horror films can reflect the ugly side of today's society. For centuries, writers have used the genre to do more than just make the audience jump at a startling music cue. Night of the Living Dead dealt with racism. Dawn of the Dead dealt with consumerism. The Thing was about cold war hysteria. My personal favorite, Rosemary's Baby, is about religion in modern America and the paranoia associated with living in New York City. Hell, we can go all the way back to Bram Stoker's "Dracula" and talk about the way the classic novel dealt with the repression of sexuality in 17th century England. With so many crappy horror films getting released these days, it's easy to forget that horror can be much more than a slasher flick filled with blood and tits (not that there is anything wrong with that- I love Piranha 3D too). But more often than not, the social commentary in films that dare to be different is placed in the background, left to be analyzed by overeager cinephiles. So it's startling to see how writer/director James DeMonaco puts the social satire in the forefront of the film.

One scene after another viewers are reminded of major events or political debates from the past few years- Occupy Wall Street, the vast differences between the rich and the poor, etc. When the main villain screams about how a homeless character is "worthless swine" he comes off as a psychopath but also seems eerily similar to an overeager commentator on Fox News. Later, a character is faced with a decision - help someone less fortunate than him at a great personal cost, or care only about helping himself. While the film may be about murder and crime, the issue at the core is not unlike the debate over helping the poor and raising taxes that is waged on news programs today. And while the film does abandon these metaphors for an intense but clichéd "monster in the house" sequence, the film returns to its satirical roots for a surprisingly dark but terrific ending. DeMonaco takes the risk of alienating his audience with a bizarre final moment that will leave gore-hounds (and perhaps much of the audience) disappointed, but it fits perfectly within the context of the film. Is any of this commentary subtle? No, but nothing about the film is subtle. And I'll take excessive political metaphors to excessive gore any day.

But, the reliance on social satire does come back to haunt DeMonaco. A writer's job is to flesh out an idea into a feature film by meshing it with numerous other ideas. He's supposed to build characters, develop the main conflict, and end the film by tying up all of these loose ends. I got the sense that DeMonaco started writing with an idea- a horror film that doubles as commentary on the state of modern America- but only fleshed out that idea, and not the others that are required to make a feature film. The characters in The Purge are shells of human beings that serve only two purposes: perpetuate the metaphor at the center of the film and line up for the slaughter. We don't find out much about the family at the center of the film, and they don't so much feel like clichés as they do robots. That's not an insults towards the actors- Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey are both perfectly competent as the two leads, while the child actors both show potential. But they never escape the script's shortcomings.

The best actor in the film is likely the most polarizing: newcomer Rhys Wakefield, who plays the chief villain credited only as Polite Stranger. Some seem to find Wakefield cheesy and over the top, while others (like myself) found him creepy and utterly fascinating. If anything comes from The Purge please let it be a decent career for Wakefield (not an endless stream of sequels). But Wakefield's performance only further highlights the problems DeMonaco has with this script: the villains are fascinating and terrifying in theory but once they are thrust into action, they become nothing more than a symbol. When the masked figures actually invade the house (not a spoiler, it's in the trailer and virtually every advertisement), these symbols become nothing more than standard masked villains. They transform from fascinating characters to knockoffs of the villains from 2008's The Strangers. On their own, the Polite Stranger and his demented cohorts are a great idea. Meshed with the other ideas in the film, it just doesn't work.

Yet, I'm recommending The Purge. Even with writing problems, this is a film that manages to say a lot more than any horror film in recent memory. It's more intense and exciting than many films released this year. As disappointing as it is when a film goes into autopilot and plays out like a standard home invasion thriller, DeMonaco managed to make these scenes suspenseful and startling. The film remained tense throughout, exploding with jolts of intensity reminiscent of 2010's The Crazies, but with a disturbing undertone that makes an audience think twice before cheering at the mayhem on screen. While he may not have screenwriting down pat, DeMonaco proves to be a competent horror director that would absolutely nail a film with a great script.

There are two types of horror films I like: ones that  depict violence and gore with a sort of self-aware glee, and horror films that use violence and gore in a way to do more than shock the audience. While there are certainly flaws with The Purge, there is no denying that it is more than just a simple thriller. While he may rely on social commentary a bit too much for his own good, DeMonaco has berthed a new horror franchise that manages to scare audiences and ask them thought provoking questions. Even if their are some problems with the execution, I think a film that intends to do more than just make audiences jump and wince deserves some praise.

OVERALL GRADE: B-