Questionable psychology, contrived plot, repetitive thrills

Rating: 5/10 (9 June 2013)

I almost never give any movies less than 5 stars unless the filmmakers clearly dismiss the art and science of movie storytelling (such as what you might find from the likes of Charles Band, Ed Wood, or Troma). Movies in which the filmmakers are trying but fail will get something from 4-6 stars from me.
Reviewers who give even movies like this "1 star" are abusing the rating system. To think that there could be no movies worse than this is ridiculous. Just watch the SyFy channel's original monster movies, like Mansquito. I dare you. The Purge does not rate at THAT level.
The Purge has a provocative idea: what if one day a year there was almost no law enforcement, so people were allowed to steal, commit violence, murder, rape, etc, without any police or legal interference? The movie takes that a step further and suggests that our culture evolves to promote this behavior as somehow patriotic, as it supposedly helped to rid our nation of violence for the rest of the year.
There are some precedents in history for barbaric annual festivals of this kind, but not to the effect that they created peace for the rest of the year.
The problem with the movie is that it misunderstands human psychology. The idea is that we all have a violent nature, and that violence in any culture can be attributed to our need to vent that nature, as if it were pressure building up in us like a tea kettle. This is not the case.
While every human has the capacity for violence, this is quite different from having a drive to be violent, even if the situation presents itself. There are some interesting studies on mob behavior, which has a bizarre counter-active effect on typical individual personality and behavior. And I think there is a genetic disposition toward competition, which is what drives people to love sports. And there are some who have a desire to hunt, which is mainly an echo from the millions of years of human survival strategy, especially before we learned how to farm. But it is not correct to presuppose that most humans would choose to go out and commit extreme recreational violence and harm against others, even murder, just to support a national holiday or purge themselves of some instinctive pressure to be violent.
Cultures that exhibit wanton violence are the result of being taught that violence is expected or required of them from a very early age. Vikings and Spartans are well known examples of such societies. A misguided and hateful culture can steer collective human behavior for some time before it is "normalized." Surely the Nazis have shown how dangerous this can be.
But without cultural pressure, humans have a high capacity for feeling shame. I think more than any other organism, possibly in Earth's history, humans indulge in a sort of psychological self-flagellation, a self-loathing that extends not just to one's self but one's gender, one's country, even one's race. I am hearing people complaining that humans are evil rubbish, comparing us to viruses (which is ironic considering how successful viruses are, and how most viruses are harmless and some have even contributed to the evolutionary advancement of life), and that we deserve to be "wiped out" before we "destroy the planet." People with these feelings might envision a movie like this as being completely accurate. In fact, they prove the movie is not - because self shame would neutralize self-indulgent violence toward others. Most humans who are not sociopathic also have a tendency toward high empathy, not only to other humans but to other creatures. This also tilts the balance toward non-violence.
The movie, as shown in the trailers, attempted to demonstrate a family that did not choose to participate in this festival. They hunkered down to ride out the storm. But the point of the movie seems to be that a majority of people seem to choose violence because they feel it helps them and helps society for the rest of the year. Not just violence but weird, psychotic behavior.
(If you wait to the credits you'll hear the suggestion that Dallas, Texas has the highest number of participants. A thinly veiled political stab?) I am growing ever-so-tired of Hollywood's cock-eyed perception that the "upper class" is made up of unsympathetic, selfish, elitist bigots. It's almost as tiresome as the idea that the military is nothing but a legal mob of evil warmongers, and that our democratic republic is a group of rights-violating conspirators intending to take advantage of the "underprivileged." These clichés are overused and their logic is unimpressive. At least The Purge chose main characters who were among that so-called "upper-class" who do not behave that way. Had they been some poor family fighting to survive attacks by the rich, I would have dropped the movie to four stars... Maybe three.
Shoving all that aside and looking at it as a popcorn movie, there are other problems. The plot was too contrived, and full of thriller clichés.
Example: do you remember a moment from any movie in which an important character is about to be killed by a bad guy, but suddenly the bad guy is killed in the last second, saving our hero's life? I'll bet you've seen that dozens of times over the last 20 years, right? Well in The Purge you'll see it not once, not twice, but at least three times! Even a new untested screenwriter shouldn't be making mistakes like that.
I could go on. The point is: this movie is made up of gratuitous well-worn thrills based on a spurious psychology.
I would pass on this one.