The Purge
Writer and Director ~ James DeMonaco
2013, USA-France
Stars ~ Ethan Hawke, Lena Headey, Max Burkholder, Adelaide Kane
Where for one night of the year, people get to cosplay as the villains they see in films and television and the one fundamental American desire seems to be to vengefully murder. They become psychopaths. You can join a gang, skip and piggyback down the hallways of victims in masks and give ironical and vacuous villainous speeches to your targets. It’s a beguiling dystopian conceit, good for a B-movie that is all about the educated and the upper class and the profiteers eating themselves from the inside out, from the outside in.
And the kid’s mobile camera – surely inspired by ‘Toy Story’ Sid’s artistry - does promote chuckles of oh, I wonder if that’s come in handy later? I can allow for the logic of the boy letting in someone he sees as in mortal danger – the whole point is his empathy – where many see a lot of Horror Characters Doing Dumb Things. But it does have a couple of subtler points that gesture at wider themes and backstory, such as the assassination attempt and Sandin’s (Ethan Hawke) evident awareness of his sham sales. Lena Headley can convey a whole marriage of doubts with small reactions and silences.
It works as satire, although it probably doesn’t stand scrutiny if you start to squint. You can play your own game of What If? For example, lawlessness permitted for a night: crossing the border? Abortion? Digital crime? If all the managers are murdered – assuming the bosses know to keep well away – shops looted, offices torched, the effect on business and economy, not to mention the clean-up, would surely not be worth the state cost (would a government accept national financial responsibility)? Would an annually disrupted economy just lead to more unemployment and to the homeless that must be purged? But stepping aside the other various possibilities, it’s murder the film is most interested in, and with American gun culture where “freedom” seems to mean to be able to shoot those who annoy you without consequence, and that seems to be the foundation. So I would quibble with Allan Almachar’s indictment that it’s “An ugly, vile, and miserable film that essentially argues that all humans are evil.” [The MacGuffin, Jul 24, 2020], because the film stamps down that it’s a specifically American Gun and Revenge Culture context. Even Trump threw up the concept of a “purge” like proposal in rambling (although comments pointed out that it wasmore akin to “Krystalnacht”): it’s an idea with lots of vengeance appeal. And isn’t premeditation still a crime?
If nothing else, it adds to the list of Home Invasion movies that warn that educated twentysomethings are just cosplaying psychopaths. Of course, this could all be avoided if they just went on holiday for the night, but that’s part of the point: it’s Ethan Hawke’s arrogance that they’ll be just fine in this neighbourhood, as long as they don’t care and shutter up, unaware that he’s deluding himself.
It's never more than it’s tropes: a home invasion B-movie with high concept pretentions. It even does the fridge door gag. But it’s enjoyable B-movie fare with enough to distinguish it and to capture the imagination. At least to go on for a franchise and a TV series.
The Purge: Anarchy
Writer & Director ~ James DeMonaco
2014, USA
Stars ~ Frank Grillo, Carmen Ejogo, Zach Gilford
Without a veneer of respectability given by prestige lead actors of the original, this sequel is even more pulpy and less thoughtful. This time with a bigger budget and out on the streets, the vision of a society in grip of murder-mania is even more garish yet less obviously critical as it gives way to action lunkheadedness. The street gangs are just a Purge or two away from going full ‘Mad Max: Road Warrior’. And again, there’s the sense that the film is gesturing criticism whilst revelling in genre debauchery. It just loves cool-posing its psycho-civilians too much. Like a less portentous ‘Civil War’ with class divides still dictating allegiances and agendas, as a stepping outside from the original, it’s entertaining if you don’t prod too much.
