The Purge
(2013) 85 Min.
Rated: R (gore)
Country: USA
Director: James DeMonaco
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Lena Headey
Links: IMDB | Wikipedia
Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
One night a year violent behavior is allowed for 12 hours. The family of a security system salesman takes in a Purge refugee and attracts the attention of his pursuers.
Synopsis:
In a future version of America with low crime rates and almost no jails as a result of an event called The Annual Purge. The event allows for citizens to behave lawlessly and murder whomever they wish to for a 12 hour period without any police intervention or consequences. Medical aid is also put on standby for this period.
It is March 21, 2022. James Sandin (Hawke) is driving home on the evening of the Purge. He is a successful businessman and has sold the most home security systems for his company. He brings home a bouquet of Baptisia flowers which will be displayed on his lawn in support of the yearly purge event.
Mr. Sanders greets his wife, Mary (Headey). She tells him that their daughter Zoey is upset about boyfriend Henry. James re-assures his wife that there’s nothing to do about the situation. Henry is 18 years old and Zoey is still in high school, so it can’t be allowed.
Meanwhile, Zoey is upstairs in her room making out with her boyfriend, Henry. She prompts him to leave before the house is locked down for the Purge event. He smiles and starts to climb down the balcony to leave.
While Mary places the flowers outside their house a neighbor walks up to her. Mrs. Grace Ferrin has come to deliver her cookies to Mary. Grace happily lets Mary know that the new addition to the house is gorgeous and not everyone had such a prosperous year as the Sandins. She cheerfully tells Mary that people are saying that the neighborhood paid for the new addition on the home since Mr. Sandin sold everyone a new security system. Mary thanks her for the cookies and goes inside to finish preparing dinner.
Charlie Sandin, meanwhile, is a quiet child who tinkers with a camera mounted inside a doll on a remote-controlled car. He calls the robot “Timmy”. Charlie voices his concerns about the purge, but his mother asks him to remember what good the purge does. Soon, he and the rest of the family meet for dinner.
After a quick meal the family prepares for lock down. The security system has cameras and monitors everything. Once ready, an emergency broadcast informs the public that the Purge is about to start. Suddenly sirens sound off marking the beginning of the Purge.
Zoey sneaks off to her room and finds that Henry has stayed inside the house. He plans to convince James that he should be Zoey’s boyfriend.
Charlie watches the monitors alone and sees a man who is in pain and needs help. Charlie, moved to help, disarms the house and calls for the man. The man is able to enter the house before the armored doors are lowered again.
As James and Mary come down to see who is inside the house, Henry comes down the stairs and calls out to James. He pulls out a gun and starts shooting towards James. James, however, also has a gun and fatally wounds Henry. Zoey and Henry retreat to her room. The bloody stranger has run off and James, Mary and Charlie decide to hide in the monitor room for a while.
James goes upstairs to check on Zoey, but finds the bloody body of Henry on the floor. Zoey finds her mother and apologizes and cries, since she did not know Henry was going to try to hurt James. She tells her mother that Henry is dead. Zoey walks off as Mary is called into the monitor room to look at the cameras.
A group of strangers gathers outside the house. One of their leaders takes off his mask and informs them that he knows they have the homeless man and they want for the Sandins to return him to them. They see him as nothing more than a dirty homeless pig who needs to be purged from the country.
The leader gives them until their provisions arrive which will allow the group to break into the house uninvited. So the leader asks for them to hand over the man or else they too will bear the wrath of the group of strangers as punishment for sheltering him.
The group cuts the power to the house, but the security system has a backup generator. The rest of the house, however, is shrouded in darkness.
James decides to find the bloody stranger and hand him over to the group outside. Charlie, on the other hand, has decided to try and save him. He sends his robot Timmy to guide the stranger to his hiding place. The man manages to hide before Mary can find him.
James, after more prodding from the leader, tries harder to look for the stranger in his house. Zoey sees Timmy and tells the robot and Charlie that she has decided to hide in his secret hiding place.
When James is searching for the stranger, he finds the stranger holding a gun to Zoey as a means of protecting himself. James repeatedly asks the stranger to let her go and leave them alone or the entire family will be killed and the stranger retorts that he didn’t deserve to be hurt either.
The stranger tells James that he doesn’t want to hurt the family, but he doesn’t want to die either. Suddenly Mary also appears with a gun and they manage to shoot the stranger and get Zoey away from him.
James and Mary then start to duct tape the man up and tape him to a chair so that they can deliver him to the group outside. Mary then has a change of heart and is disgusted by their behavior. Zoey and Charlie also walk away disgusted, leaving James and the stranger alone.
The stranger asks James to take him outside. James sighs and walks away.
Suddenly, a large truck arrives.
James gives a gun to Charlie and helps Mary to further arm herself as they now plan to defend their home.
The leader informs them that the group outside will now enter the home. The truck pulls off the large door and the window covers are also compromised.
Mr. Sandin manages to kill a number of the group, but he is stabbed in the chest by the Leader.
Suddenly another group start to kill off the first group of intruders. This group, however, is comprised of the Sandin’s neighbors.
The Leader is about to kill Mary and Charlie, when Zoey arrives and kills him.
James dies in the arms of his family who are grief-stricken. They sit and mourn him as the neighborhood group arrives inside the house. Grace, their leader, informs them that they saw what was happening outside and decided to help.
Grace then tells them that the neighbors only saved them so that they could kill the family themselves. She informs Mary that when the barriers came down they saw it as an opportunity to cleanse themselves of their hatred. Seeing the new addition to the house, they were angry that the Sandin family had made so much off of their neighbors.
Just as the neighbors are about to kill Mary and her children the stranger shows up and kills one of the neighbors and holds Grace at gunpoint. He gives Mary the option and asks her what they should do. Grace pleads for them to kill them quickly and get it over with, however Mary decides to try to spend the rest of the night in peace.
They spend the rest of the night around a dining room table with a shot gun placed in the middle. The stranger watches them in the corner and they wait for time to pass. For a moment, Mary is distracted watching her children cry over the body of their father. Grace tries to reach for the gun, but Mary slams her head on the table and tells her “No more killing tonight!”
Finally, the sirens sound that mark the end of the Purge. Mary asks everyone to get out of her house. The stranger places his gun down and Mary asks him if he will be okay. He says he will and wishes her good luck.
The film ends.
Review:
What seems at first like an interesting premise falls a bit flat in The Purge.
This movie is hard to classify as a horror, since there really isn’t much of a horror build-up. Any deaths in the movie are presented in such a way that it feels more akin to an action movie. And therein lies my biggest problem. The movie so desperately wants to tell us how horrific this world is, but we are only given small snippets of it through radio conversations and a brief sequence of footage at the start of the film.
Our point of view is seen through the privileged class who usually don’t suffer through this night. If we are supposed to assume that the stranger entering the house is dangerous just because he’s black and an outsider, well that would be racist and not really an assumption most people would make.
So instead the film has the premise of “What if a man sells security systems and it fails to secure him and his family?” Which, in my opinion, isn’t as interesting as the rampaging chaos of the Purge itself.
I will give the film credit for a few surprises such as having the boyfriend stay in the house during the purge and having the neighbors “rescue” the family. I knew the neighbors hated the family, but had forgotten about it during the movie. So seeing them again was a bit of a surprise.
In short, the film seemed a little bit heavy handed on its moral. It seems to be saying “isn’t the purge a horrible idea? Well now the characters seem to realize this is a stupid idea, too!” Instead, I found myself a bit curious how such a silly idea was made the rule in a country in the first place. I was more curious about this world of the Purge rather than the family we were stuck observing.
