The First Purge Review: 2 Ups & 7 Downs

Downs...

7. Marisa Tomei Is Totally Wasted

The fact that an actress of Marisa Tomei's calibre could be roped into appearing in a Purge prequel is surprise enough, but it's disappointing that she wasn't at least given an interesting or substantial role to have fun with.

Tomei plays Dr. May Updale, the so-called "architect" of the Purge, who observes the experiment from the apparent comfort of a control room in order to examine its effectiveness and how "human nature" responds to it.

Sadly Tomei spends most of her 10-ish minutes of screen time confined to this single room, doing nothing but spouting lazily-written exposition and bringing some star power to a movie otherwise completely devoid of it.

Most disappointing of all, however, is how abruptly she disappears from the movie. It's as though the producers realised they could only afford Tomei for so many days and had to quickly contrive a reason for her character to no longer appear in the movie. Terrible.