How to be a scriptwriter in one easy lesson!

Rating: 4/10 (2 February 2014)

Want to sell your scripts for a fortune? The Purge shows you how it's done. Find an easily marketable premise which grabs people's attention ("Dystopian future: one night a year, murder is legal"), and that's it - you can coast on your high-concept idea without bothering with the rest of the script.
Writing for The Purge could be charitably called a mess: characters are blank slates ("the father", "the mother", "the son", "the daughter"), its garden-variety nihilism laughable; dialogues so absurdly on the nose, they sound like a parody; and if you were surprised by a resolutive intervention near the end, you are the kind of viewer who would run away terrified from a train projected on a big screen, like the first public of brothers Lumière. The final scene, with the most awkward neighbors' reunion ever filmed, gives a new meaning to the word "anticlimactic" and almost achieves a kind of unintentional, sublime ridiculousness.
Action consists of people crawling in an inexplicably huge house in the dark - seriously, Headey moves around for like 20 minutes during the climax without stumbling into any of the ten or so intruders, or into her husband wrestling with them. For long stretches it feels like wandering into IKEA at night - dark room, furniture, furniture, new dark room - only punctuated by cheap jump scares. Compare this to Fincher's Panic Room, with its careful sense of movements and spatial relationships within the confined environment
Hawke and Headey are both capable performers, wasted here in roles which require alternatively either wide-eyed panic or squint-eyed determination. Perhaps the worst offender is how the high-concept sci-fi premise turns out to be irrelevant: this is essentially just another "home invasion" thriller, like dozens which have preceded it.
Watch Bryan Bertino's The Strangers instead, as it played with a similar scenario with much higher craft (in spite of its wafer-thin plot) and skillful use of pacing, framing and composition.
4/10