The Purge

When I started this blog I ended my initial list to be reviewed with the Saw, Paranormal Activity, and Purge series. I did this because I feel that these films have defined the last decade of horror. Each series spent several years as the single largest ongoing horror series, and just as one began to decline, the next came charging in to take the title.

This series is a bit different from the other two. So far, none of The Purge films have been given October releases (as I write this in February 2016, Election Year is scheduled for July). Furthermore, the Producers seem far less determined to get a yearly release out of The Purge series, judging by the two year delay between the second and third entries.

Unlike the other two series, it also gets better with age instead of worse. It's neither as boring as Paranormal Activity, nor as disgusting as Saw. More significantly, it's actually smarter than either. Where those films have begun their decent into obscurity, I actually think these movies will have a place in popular culture long after the final entry.

The biggest problem with this series is the narrative attempting to place the film in our future. The story would have worked far better in an alternate time line that diverged at least a hundred years ago. I can believe that humans raised in a society with so little value for human life could approve of something like the Purge, but I do not believe that an economic collapse could bring about acceptance of the idea so quickly from our current civilization. More importantly, plenty of people have analyzed how little sense the Purge makes economically. A purely cultural explanation would have been far more believable, something like Shirley Jackson's The Lottery.

That said, I give this film my optimistic appraisal because it hits all the right buttons as a satire, while never winking at us or letting the material fall into spoof territory. The whole film is actually quite chilling. If you believe there are evil people in this world, you'll likely be afraid of this film whether it's realistic or not.

To address the actual movie, the premise is that the economic collapse of 2008 continued to get worse, until crime and poverty ran rampant. This allowed a new political party, The New Founding Fathers, to seize power and amend the US Constitution to legalize all crime for 12 hours (except for crimes committed against high-ranking government officials, or with military-grade weaponry). The catharsis of the Purge has apparently lowered the crime rate the rest of the year, and killing off the poor has taken a strain off the economy allowing for prosperity (yes, this is absurd).

The focus of this film is a single family during the Purge. Many fans of the series see this first film as inferior for precisely this reason: We're in the middle of utter chaos, and we get a home invasion thriller about this one household. However, I think it allows the film to make better use of it's rather modest budget (remember that the budget was tripled for Anarchy). It's also an effective introduction to this world, as we see how every member of the family deals with the idea of the Purge.

Mr. James Sandin (Ethan Hawke) is a Security System salesman who has gotten rich from the fear, but can't bring himself to participate. He listens to the news with a conflicted look on his face, safe behind his barricades. His wife, Mary (Lena Heady), goes to exercise as the Purge starts, trying to keep her mind off it. Their daughter, Zoey (Adelaide Kane), barely acknowledges the Purge, and is far more concerned about her older boyfriend Henry (Tony Oller) who her father disapproves of. Their son, Charlie (Max Burkholder), is a card-carrying liberal who enjoys the benefits of his family's wealth while still voicing mild objections to the Purge.

The night probably would have gone well for the Sandins, but Charlie sees a homeless man (Edwin Hodge) running for his life down their street and opens the security system to let him in. The stranger disappears into their house to hide (while James is distracted by a gun battle with Henry, who snuck into the house and seems to exist in the movie only to be killed while providing this distraction). The Sandins' neighbors then inform a group of masked college students who had been chasing the man that the Sandins are hiding him. The students, led by an unnamed young man played by Rhys Wakefield, give the Sandins a time limit to surrender the man before they break down the security system and murder everyone in the house.

The drama of this scenario comes from two points: firstly, while the man is not hostile to the Sandins, we're shown that he has military dog tags, and clearly knows how to defend himself (we're told that he already killed one of the students). Secondly, the family has always accepted the Purge, but has never engaged in it themselves. With the exception of Charlie who continues trying to protect the man, the idea of actually giving another human being up to death clearly cuts them deep.

It's because of this uncertainty that they finally refuse the students. Instead of surrendering another human being, James decides to use his stockpile of weapons to turn into Rambo protecting his family (I like to imagine “I'm Rambo” literally being written into Hawke's contract to lower his salary by a hundred grand or so). We get a number of decent action scenes featuring him.

For some bizarre reason the family decides to just leave the homeless man to his own devices, rather than asking the veteran to help them defend their home. Perhaps they didn't want to put a gun in the hand of a stranger on Purge night, but I fail to see what they had to lose. That said, the action scene in this movie are really good for a $3 million film.

After James is killed all seems lost until the neighbors charge in and slaughter the students...because they want to kill the Sandins themselves. Apparently all their friends had grown bitter at James' success. I think the commentary for that scene is unspoken, but obvious. We hear the word “jealous” from rich Conservatives so much in our society, describing how they imagine the poor to view them. This scene cuts right to the truth: only the rich have the luxury of jealousy. The poor have real problems.

The stranger, however, saves the remaining Sandins, and Mary forces the surviving neighbors to sit peacefully in their house until the Purge is over. We get more propaganda over the news, and the film ends. What happens to the Sandins next is left to our imaginations.

Is this film as good as Anarchy? Hell no. Still, it's a prologue. It sets us up for what's to come, while providing a biting satire of the world we live in. A world where “patriotic” now means carrying an assault rifle on your back when you go to get lunch, and the Right constantly whine that they have to pay a higher tax rates than their housekeepers. The Purge will be remembered long after Saw, and Paranormal Activity have been forgotten.