Total waste of potential

Rating: 4/10 (30 November 2014)

The Purge has a great premise: One night a year all crime is legal and a family try to survive the night. There's plenty of opportunity for scary thrills and social commentary. This movie offers neither, since it's a total chicken and chickens out of actually doing anything interesting. This is a movie which devolves as it goes along, like Benjamin Button. It starts out well. Good premise, thought provoking set up, some tension and when a group of creepy villains show up at the house, you think you're in for some scary action. You're not. This is not a totally intolerable film and remains watchable throughout. It's such a great premise that it's difficult not to take some sort of interest in the movie. It's also too short and underdeveloped to do too much harm to anyone who sees it. It's not scary, but there's some very mild tension. The Purge just needed to be handled by a better writer and director. A higher budget than just $3 million dollars might not have hurt either.
The main problem with TP is its lack of actual fear. The lighting's too dark to actually see anything properly and the direction is very flat. It often feels like hider in the house, and there's no real suspense. The moral dilemmas presented throughout the film aren't given enough attention and are solved with stupid writing. The script is another thing which lets it down. The characters are stupid, don't feel real and just aren't interesting. They also change their minds in very silly ways. The film is at first mildly suspenseful horror but towards the end degenerates into clichéd and numbing violence, which is the final proof that TP is in reality nothing special at all and something we've seen 50+ times before. A sequel was released this year mysteriously although apparently it was a bit better. A prequel is planned for next year. It looks like we're going to get a purge every year. Still, I'll take them over Paranormal Activity. To sum up: LAME.
4/10