The Purge: by Danny

This review, and all the other reviews, contains spoilers.

It's not about enemas. It's about enemies. That should have been the tagline.

I was a little worried this was going go be a horror movie, but Sci-Fi was mentioned somewhere in the description, along with Ethan Hawke, so I went to see it. The Purge has a really strong central idea - every year for one night all crime is legal and anything goes. Ethan is a contented rich guy who can afford protection, and locks down his big house for Purge Night. There's other rich guys who enjoy the The Purge and go outside their houses for a little 'hunting', to let off steam or take out someone they don't like. The few poor people left in society end up killing each other or just trying to stag safe.

Ethan plays a different role to usual. I'm so used to him being nice and innocent that I gave him the benefit of the doubt for a long time, before realising that actually his character really is supposed to be a bit of a prick. The give away is that he keeps fist pumping when he mentions his bonus from work. I also found Ethan's wife quite annoying, but I'm not sure if I was supposed to. It may be partly because she plays evil Cersei Lannister. There were certainly suggestions that the family were a little 'too perfect', which is why all the neighbours hated them. When Ethan got home she was cooking dinner, wearing high heels (do women do that?), and claimed "Dinner's nearly ready honey" or something like that, even though she'd only just begun chopping some vegetables.

Ethan's family were very casual about putting down the shutters for Purge Night, I guess to imply that they were usually totally safe and it was exceptional for anything to go wrong. But of course it did go wrong. The moral son opens their shutters to let in a desperate man, and a mob of masked preppy kids out enjoying The Purge demand his release so they can exercise their right to Purge, or they'll get Ethan's family too. The director (James DeMonaco) wrote The Negotiator and Assault on Precinct 13, so I should have known a siege was coming up.

Ethan is hard-nosed and wants to toss the poor black guy out the window for the mob to kill, but then has a cathartic change of heart and decides not to. Seconds later the poor guy says "no, you should throw me out the window", which shows that he's a nice guy too, so Ethan was right to save him. Ethan then decides his family will fight the mob, but they do it very cack-handedly. Can't they just wind down one of their windows and shoot the smug Joker-ish guy in the face? His wife, who played Sarah Connor in the Sarah Connor Chronicles, is surprisingly deadwood and Ethan has to slay about eight of them himself before getting stabbed, good work for a middle aged salesman.

An interesting idea about The Purge is that everyone needs to feel the release, even those who think they don't. This was hinted at by Ethan in his control room, and turned out to be true when at the end of the night his jealous neighbours take advantage of the mayhem to come round and take out Ethan's family. A minor query, was the Asian guy involved at the end? He was definitely in one scene, then didn't appear again.

There's a subplot about Ethan's daughter's boyfriend Henry, who tries to take advantage of the amnesty on Purge Night to shoot Ethan. This is a nice idea, and probably could have done with happening in a separate household, if the script could have stretched to two families rather than cramming everything into one house. The problem with Henry's plan, is that even though he won't get prosecuted for the crime, there's still going to be consequences. There's going to be a strain on the relationship if everyone knows he shot her father in front of the family.

That's a general problem with Purge Night - you might not be convicted for crimes but everyone will still know, for example, that you killed your boss with an axe. Maybe that's OK though, they'll just bottle up their feelings then try and kill you next year. Or maybe people who've grown up with The Purge have gotten so used to it they can forget about what happens for the other 364 days of the year, and what happens on Purge Night stays on Purge Night?

I'm focusing on the idea, as the action itself was fairly poor. I counted four times when someone was about to be killed, only for their potential assassin to be surprisingly shot in the back just in time. Ethan's son introduces two things early on, that you know will appear later on. Firstly, he has a radio controlled car, which he boasts "can now see in infra-red, and I've muffled the motor so it's virtually silent!" Not very subtle. Secondly, he shows everyone his strange habit of recording his own pulse with a heart rate monitor on his watch. It's a little harder to work out where that's going to reappear. Turns out that he rather morbidly attaches it to his Dad's wrist as he is expiring, so we can all hear Ethan's final pulses. A nice touch.

The single night of madness, and the scary masks, makes Purge Night feel a lot like Halloween. This genuinely is a night where more crime is gotten away with. My house was burgled once on Halloween, and the police were too busy to come and deal with it because of other 'mischief'. The next year the house was again burgled on Halloween. But Purge Night is definitely not Halloween, in the end credits they reveal it's March 21st. Afterwards, while I was purging myself in the bathroom, I wondered why they'd chosen 21st March. Then it became clear to me, it's the night before William Shatner's birthday! In fact, Shatner's Eve would be a much better title.