I Purged And Cleansed!

Rating: 8/10 (22 October 2013)

I would hate to change the habit of a life time and actually start agreeing with the masses but i'm afraid The Purge appealed to me in a basic way and i loved it!
As usually i checked out a few reviews before watching the movie and funny enough, despite 99% of the time having the opposite opinion of the majority of the reviews on IMDb, i still found my expectations of this movie lowered by what i was reading. The first review giving it only 1 star, very unfair.
The basic premise of the movie is that that once a year, for 12 hours, there is no such thing as crime. There are rules to The Purge such as you are only allowed to use up to class 4 weapons and government officials of "ranking 10 or higher" must remain unharmed.The idea behind this is so that people get all there urges out of their systems during the 12 hours and crime rate is lower for the rest of the year. There is however the idea thrown in there that this whole concept is just the governments way of reducing poverty, as the movie shows the rich have the money to protect themselves and the poor tend to be the ones who are being hunted by the rich. I would have like for this to be played on a little more as i thought it was a great idea to play on, the government want to decrease poverty so once a year they let people kill the poor.
On a whole the acting in the movie was of average standard, Ethan Hawke acting a very similar way in which he did in Sinister and Daybreakers and Lena Headey for me will never cap her role in Game Of Thrones. But great acting is not what this movie is meant to be about.
I personally thought two performances in this movie stood out. The first being Rhys Wakefield who plays the "polite Leader", the performance to me was a la Christian Bale in American Psycho. the second was Arija Bareikis who plays Mrs Grace Ferrin. At the beginning of the movie she is completely forgettable but as the movie comes to a climax i found her psychosis intoxicating, reminding me much of Karen Black in House of 1000 Corpses.
To conclude i found The Purge a refreshing change from the run of the mile production line box office horror that seems to have infected our multiplexes. The ideas were not 100% developed or flawless by any means but it was a a very good attempt in my opinion.
Don't Believe All You Read! Give it a try and we will hopefully be seeing more next Purge!