The concept is great...but the execution...

Rating: 6/10 (7 October 2013)

I'll be honest, I like the concept of this film more than the final product. I'm not saying I didn't like the movie--I did--it's just that with the story, it had the potential to be something amazing. It just didn't live up to what it had going for it.
The one thing that hurts this movie is the fact the story is a little sloppy. The movie offers up a twist ending (and it's even perfectly foreshadowed at the beginning) but the problem comes because the plot doesn't feel feathered out well enough and many of the characters aren't developed as well as they should be. This ends up making most of the story and the ending feel either quickly or haphazardly put together. Even with a twist ending that makes perfect sense feels like it was tacked on.
Many of the characters felt like they should have a richer background and this could have made some of these characters more interesting or more sympathetic but all development was focused on the tormented family. While having a mystery figure play the antagonist (and Rhys Wakefield played it awesomely), it would have been nice to see the character have a little more depth to it.
But not all is bad in this movie. While it has its shortcomings, most of the cast (especially Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey) are great in their roles and director James DeMonaco did a great job at crafting tension and a feeling of claustrophobia for the family trapped in their house...and we can't forget just how awesome the concept of living in a world where crime is legal once a year for 12-hours and how it is just instant thriller material! "The Purge" had a lot of potential going into it as it called back to those great sci-fi tales about Utopian societies that carry the dark secret of how they got to be so great but, due to a little messiness, the film ends up wasting its potential and just ends up an average (but decent) movie.
You can read a more in-depth review of this (and other) movies at my blog at revronmovies.blogspot.com