Such a Shame To See a Great Premise Go To Waste

Rating: 3/10 (3 April 2014)

I remember I first heard about this film in an ad before a YouTube video. It started with a voice-over said "Don't skip this ad. You are about to see the trailer for the most disturbing movie of the year." That was a bold statement, considering Evil Dead had already come out and The Conjuring was right around the corner. So naturally, I was curious and didn't skip the ad. One of the first things I noticed was that Ethan Hawke was in the film. I am a fan of Ethan Hawke, and since he was in Sinister a few months prior (one of the scariest films I've ever seen), I was even more curious. Then I noticed the interesting premise about all crime being legal for 24 hours, and as I sat and watched the trailer, I thought "You know, this movie has a lot of potential if they do it right..."
Finally, June arrived and the release date came along, so I saw the film. I was surprised to see a lot of awful acting, bad directing, and a poorly written story. Any and all potential that this premise had was completely wasted. The filmmakers took the premise and did the laziest thing possible: they made it into a cheap slasher flick. The Purge tries to make you feel isolated/alone in a small area with people hunting you, much like how the first Alien movie did. But The Purge relies too much on jump-scares to scare you, which is not a good tactic for horror movies. Good horror has slow-building tension and a release, two things that The Purge has none of.
The characters and the acting are similar in the sense that they're terrible and make you angry. The kids make HORRIBLE decisions, and even in some instances, endanger their own lives. For example, there is a scene where the daughter is upset with her parents, so she walks off, while the people are still invading their house. She risks her life just to act rebellious. Then the people invading the house aren't great either. They all seem to wear masks and act insane to seem creepy. This could have worked, but the moment someone fires a gun at them, they immediately stop acting this way, and they take cover and act like regular people, which gets rid of any creepiness of them possibly being mentally insane.
My final rating for The Purge is a 3/10. I hoped that this movie would at least be worthy of a Redbox rent, but it isn't even worth that. Part of me feels that I went in expecting too much, and I probably did. However, in a way, with the marketing and the premise, I didn't expect too much out of it. If you say that your movie is the most disturbing movie of the year, then you better give me the most disturbing movie of the year.