There are great premises that make great movies, and then there are great premises that make for lousy ones. As this setup may imply, the Purge is decidedly one of the latter. A clumsily directed and laughably misguided attempt to make a generic slasher film, The Purge's greatest crime is how it wastes a terrific premise. The Premise: In a dystopian version of the United States, all crime becomes legal for a single night a year, as a method of both culling the population and releasing repressed aggressive tendencies amongst the populace. Commentary on human nature aside, the socio-economic implications of this ingenious (if somewhat far-fetched) premise are so implicitly interesting, the execution the film is going with cannot possibly satisfy. "What happens when a gang of masked psychopaths attack your home?" is nowhere NEAR the most interesting question raised by the concept of "The Purge", but the film somehow thinks so, making the proceedings very bland, indeed. The trailer for The Purge 2 dropped the other day, reminding us that the filmmakers are getting a second chance to make good on their concept's potential. One can always hope.
Self-evidently a man who writes for the Internet, Robert also writes films, plays, teleplays, and short stories when he's not working on a movie set somewhere. He lives somewhere behind the Hollywood sign.
