Beyond stupid

Rating: 2/10 (30 June 2013)

In the oh so near future there's one day where you can go out and commit whatever crime you want. The idea for the movie might sound somewhat interesting at first. Questions pop up such as: what kind of society agrees to a thing like this? How does this affect daily life, knowing/assuming that your neighbor or employee might be trying to kill you, or tried to last year? Doesn't an annual crime green card for murder and rape for Average Joe even lead to a more doomed, sick society? Nobody knows, because the movie doesn't bother with those boring details. Everybody seems to be cool with this (except for the oddball son) because ever since then all citizens agree to only commit crime during the purge. It's ... magic!
In many movies you have that one annoying character. This movie does different. Everybody is annoying. Only the stranger seems to be the only sane and bearable person (a "thank you" might have helped the situation though). Everybody else is nuts.
As soon as the main plot starts everything gets chaotic. All of them are running around and are acting unpredictably. It goes like "There's a guy in our house and we need to save our daughter? Well, let's check the monitors first to see what is going on *outside*!". We also learn that the safest way to protect your family apparently is to split up: son, you go there. Woman, you go defend something over there. Daughter, umm - where was she again? Nevermind. Let's not even talk about the girls boyfriend. Go figure yourself what he was thinking, because I don't know. Then we got the spooky masked villains. Apparently some students on their annual purge rite, trying to act like a mixture between the (Dark Knight-) Joker and Alex from Clockwork Orange. Well, ... trying. In the end the other friendly neighborhood villains show up, killing the other villains, only to try to kill the family themselves. Because in the future society it's totally okay and good for society and your soul to kill a family including their children during the purge, just because they have too much money. Of course they fail but their lives are spared leading to the most interesting part of the movie, opening the doors wide open for a sequel. If the movie does well in the box office there will likely be one and it would give the opportunity to show us how the other 364 days until the next purge will be like, now knowing that their neighbors tried to kill them, leaving room for character development. But let's be honest. This is not gonna happen (the insights, not the sequel).