The Purge

My introduction was initially going to be the usual light hearted nonsense that you have come to expect from me but then my race happened. By now Black people talking loudly in a theater has become a bit of a cliché, and you would think a culture that is typically ahead of the curve when it comes to coolness would recognize how wack it is to talk during a movie; but apparently not. There was this idiot that continued to jabber the entire time while her fellow black friends, who were clearly embarrassed by it, laughed nervously at her stupid comments anyway for fear of being beaten. She was a rather large and aggressive woman, so I can kind of understand.

As I was sitting there, I was secretly wishing that there was some sort of a Purge exception rule. My theory was that for one random incident a year, you could kill someone that truly deserved it and forgo your annual night of purging that was legally granted to you by the government.  But then I realized that all that this would do is simply add to the list of excuses that racists would use to kill black people. What if I decided to join in just so I could take out loud idiots in the theater? Would I be the  Clayton Bigsby of Purging? “Condalingus Rice??? Sounds like a Mexican dish! They ought to send her down to Mexico so the Mexicans will eat her. White Power!”

Well once I got up and moved away from this clown,  I was finally able to get into what seemed to be yet another solid effort from Ethan Hawke in the horror game. The premise of The Purge is that in this “new America”, unemployment is at an all time low of 1%, the economy is thriving, and there is little to no violence anymore. And they credit all of this to the one night a year where all forms of violence, including murder, is allowed. Hawke and his family are pretty well off now because he is the #1 salesman of the most popular security system on the market and with a night of violence like this on the horizon, it’s a pretty easy sell.  For the most part his family seems happy, with the exception of his teenage daughter, and she is upset because he won’t allow her to date an older 18 year old boy. Then there is his younger son who can’t quite grasp the idea of no one else seeing a problem with legal murder and violence.

I think you see where I am headed with this. Having the naughty daughter in Zoey (played by the incredibly hot Adelaide Kane) and the morally idealistic and naive little boy; you can’t help but know that one of them will eventually do something stupid that will lead to bad things happening. The moral I got from the story is to simply not have kids.. One way or another they will lead to either excruciating pain or an accelerated death.  The one exception being, your daughter grows up to look like Adelaide Kane and wears a schoolgirl outfit for 90 minutes.

After the entire nation locks their homes down for the night, the little kid Charlie sees a random bloody stranger that is begging for help but no one offering any. So while no one is looking he sneaks him into their home. Well this doesn’t sit well with the party of highly educated and well off kids that were chasing him down and they threaten Hawke and his family to either give up the man or they will come in and murder everyone.

The movie sets the tone for the violence that is to come right out of the gate by showing you video footage of beatings and killings from the year before in the opening credits. And in this society everyone agrees that the purge is necessary and doesn’t really look at anyone sideways for being a part of it. So the people that are at Hawke’s door could be jealous neighbors, disgruntled employees, or just random kids who are out to exercise their legal rights because they are bored. And that’s what’s so weird and creepy about this movie. People that seem to be normal are now at your door with guns and machetes for no other reason than random violence. The director James Demonaco does a decent job of both telling the underlying story of how society views the poor and homeless and in creating a fairly creepy atmosphere as the “freaks” break into Hawke’s home. The lack of a great score however keeps this movie from being as good as The Strangers was with Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler. So scenes where the freaks are sneaking up behind Hawke and his family aren’t as tense as they should be and it comes off feeling more like an action flick than a horror movie. But the scenes where Hawke is shotgunning and axing people to death will have you screaming like the annoying Black woman I mentioned earlier was.

This movie isn’t great but it’s definitely worth the price of admission, so I will give it a rating of barely FRESH.