If you could kill someone and get away with it, would you?
Let’s take that question one step farther: If you could kill someone, and it wasn’t illegal, would you? No jail time, no worrying about the death penalty, just getting that elephant off your chest.
I’ll come back to that question later. For now, let’s discuss The Purge, a movie that offers a frightening answer to that question.
The Purge is an action thriller set in 2022. Throughout its running time, it swings from improbable to effective, but it ends with the latter, so it works. There were times when I nearly gave up on it, but it always sucked me back in.
To stay with the movie for two hours, you have to buy an outlandish premise: In the near future, the U.S. economy approaches the point of collapse and crime goes through the roof. To save the nation, a new group of founding fathers devises The Purge, an annual 12-hour event in which most crime, including murder, is legal. By allowing people to “purge” their inner beast once a year, they become law-abiding citizens for the other 364 days a year. Moreover, unemployment drops to one percent.
Yeah, right.
Anyway, meet the Sandins, a well-to-do family. The father, James, sells home security systems designed to protect people during The Purge. The mom, Mary, tends to the house. The adolescent son, Charlie, builds things, like a mobile camera with night vision. The teenage daughter, Zoey, sneaks her older boyfriend into her room.
I liked this family. Writer and director James DeMonaco makes them feel just superficial enough, and just caring enough, to seem real. When James asks everyone about his or her day at the dinner table, the daughter rolls her eyes and says, “This is stupid.” Instead of getting offended, James says, “But I care about your day,” and then a food fight breaks out.
The hour of The Purge arrives and James activates his security system. But the family is far from safe. In a shocking moment I will not divulge, two events occur simultaneously that pop the bubble and put the life of everyone in the house at violent risk.
Up until that moment, I was teetering. The premise of The Purge is a lot to swallow. The residents of the neighborhood in which the movie is set live comfortably, and every time someone mentioned one of the expensive security systems, I’d think, “Wouldn’t a round trip ticket to Canada be cheaper?”
Anyway, once the family’s safety has been compromised, a tense cat-and-mouse game takes place between the parents, the son, and a third element that has entered the home. I loved the idea of Charlie trying to outsmart his parents, not out of spite, but out of a good heart. Then the movie pulled a humdinger of a dumb move and nearly lost me. (You’ll know it when it happens.) But DeMonaco salvages things with a harrowing home invasion scene that had the opening night crowd with which I saw the film alternately screaming and cheering.
Other than the iffy premise and random bullheaded moments, I liked The Purge, mainly because it’s genuinely suspenseful. My only other complaint is the movie has no visual style. DeMonaco shot too closely to his characters, and used the abhorred shaky-cam technique for the action, making it hard to see what’s going on. But I’ve groused about that enough in previous columns.
If The Purge has a point to make, it’s not that humans are violent creatures. That much is obvious. I believe DeMonaco is frightened by the tendency of conservatives in this country to buy into the party line, whatever that is. By setting the movie only nine years in the future and depicting an America far different from today, DeMonaco clearly thinks this is an urgent problem. In the end, though, I think The Purge is more concerned about entertainment than social commentary, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
So, if you could kill someone, and it wasn’t illegal, would you? The scariest thing about The Purge is some people would.
Three stars out of four. Rated R for disturbing violence and language.