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(Download The Purge) What happens when the walls of social obedience fall and human beings find themselves encouraged to indulge their baser, more destructive natures? A philosophical chestnut beloved by speculative fiction writers the world over, that question becomes the driving force behind James DeMonaco’s new sci-fi thriller The Purge. Although the trailers are selling it as a grim home invasion flick, the film itself plays more like Rod Serling meets John Carpenter,(Download The Purge) provoking thoughts at the same time it breaks bodies in the name of entertainment. Critics who often howl at the empty-headed brutality of most modern horror films may find themselves perplexed by The Purge; it builds its action off an original idea, considerably limits the vile potential of its premise, and somehow, still remains as steadfastly silly as its less ambitious brethren.

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(Download The Purge) In fact, how much you end up enjoying The Purge will be directly related to how willing you are to accept its ground-level conceit; that a brief decade from now, America will participate in a government-sanctioned ‘purge’ night, which allows all citizenry a full evening of indulging in criminal activity, as long as low-range weapons are used and governmental figures are exempt from targeting.(Download The Purge) Thanks to the “New Founding Fathers,” who use the Purge to balance a severe conservative regime, crime is way down the other three-hundred-and-sixty-four days of the year and the economy is soaring. Part of this is easily explained by the nature of this world, which has developed so that rich yuppies can protect themselves within state-of-the-art fortresses (going out only to victimize if they so choose) while the poor—and particularly the homeless—have fewer means of preservation, and gradually begin to unburden the country with their non-existence.(Download The Purge) While there are logistical holes all around this premise, I found the concept interesting enough I was willing to play along. Once you arrive there, The Purge is a fast-paced, blunt-force journey into one hard night.

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(Download The Purge) Although there’s a harrowing and tantalizing prologue depicting video footage of nation-wide implementation of the purge, DeMonaco chooses to limit the scope and footage to one particular—and priveledged—family ,The Sandins, whose grueling experience over the next twelve hours is the meat of the film. James Sandin (Ethan Hawke) is the patriarch, who’s made a good living from security systems, now a necessity for the wealthy in a purge-sanctioned world.(Download The Purge) When the infamous time window closes, James is sealed up in his lavish, fortified home with his wife Mary (Lena Headey), stand-offish daughter Zoe (Adelaide Kane), geeky son Charlie (Max Burkholder) and Lena’s persistent boyfriend Henry (Tony Oller) who has more-or-less stowed away for the night.

(Download The Purge) The elder Sandins view the Purge as a necessary evil, one they do not partake of themselves but happily ignore to sustain their way of life. All of this changes when Charlie expresses compassion and opens up the barricades to let a homeless war vet (Edwin Hodge) inside so he may escape the hoodlums pursuing him. Now, that gang of frenzied, high-society kids are doing their best to infiltrate Casa Sandin while their eerie figurehead, the snaky-sinister Rhys Wakefield, delivers chilling ultimatums from the security cameras on the front stoop.(Download The Purge) As the night progresses, James and his brood will confront their own ideals and understanding of morality, making sacrifices and giving up their illusions along the way. DeMonaco keeps the movie humming along with a stripped-down intensity that rarely lets up, and his fine set of actors distract from the more routine passages in The Purge’s more pedestrian final third.

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(Download The Purge) A large part of why The Purge works as the thriller it wants to be is thanks to Hawke and his portrayal of James. Once the film begins to trade-up the social science fiction for a Straw Dogs-esque confrontation, it’s important that James and his brood channel realistic survival instincts. Hawke takes a protagonist that is neither hero nor villain on the page, and makes him a believable family man whose complicity with the Purge has never been questioned until now.(Download The Purge) Like he did with Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, Hawke internalizes the implications of this alternate reality and makes the world more real by displaying its effect on the characters. Headey matches Hawke’s James with a maternal figure that must weigh the instincts to protect she and hers with her own shelved morality. Burkholder and Kane get some very effective moments too, and together these four characters form a realistic family bond that we can relate to, and which engenders thrills when the bad guys show up.

(Download The Purge) Those bad guys, for the most part, are unfortunately generic, and when they wander the shadowy halls and rooms of the Sandin home, they become interchangeable masked opponents. DeMonaco, who wrote the modestly effective Assault on Precinct 13 remake, understands this imbalance and has given us Wakefield as the sneering, Alex Delarge clone who lends voice to the movie’s more overt social critiques.(Download The Purge) Wakefield really comes to the fore in The Purge, and while he’s not as imposing as he could be (he’s mostly taunting from the cameras) he makes his smiling psychopathic a convincing creation. Edwin Hodge’s fearful veteran could be a flat symbolic character, but the actor squeezes plenty of empathy out of him, and it seeps out to the surrounding Sandins who slowly thaw over the course of the film.

(Download The Purge) DeMonaco is a good director and his stylistic inflections keep the fear and excitement running once the attackers are in the house. He also manages to isolate and enlarge the overarching fable aspects of the premise as the cat-and-mouse game plays out. Too many of these scenes involve other characters wandering up and subduing others, but there’s a conflict between James and a few of the assailants that may be the best set piece in any of these Blumhouse productions.(Download The Purge) The twists that develop as the movie proceeds are reasonably hard to swallow, and ultimately the thriller conventions that overwhelm the second half keep it from being the intelligent creep-fest that the early sections promise.

(Download The Purge) Despite its flaws, and sometimes limited focus, The Purge is still an intriguing and enjoyable thriller that works best in the moment, but leaves some tantalizing questions in its wake. You may find yourself surprised to walk out thinking about the ways in which complicity with evil can be easier than struggling for good, instead of trying to puzzle out who has to collect all those bodies when the Purge is over.

(Download The Purge) Dystopian survival-horror/action-thriller THE PURGE posits that, in the year 2022, one financial crisis too many results in a strange and disturbing rebirth of America. Under the leadership of "The New Founding Fathers", a majority of Americans agree with their program of allowing a once a year, 12 hour period in which all crime (including murder) is legal as a sort of societal release valve. This somehow solves not just the country's financial problems, but more or less eliminates crime the rest of the year, as well.(Download The Purge) The Purge, as it's called, is so successful that substantive opposition to it appears nonexistant (at least we don't see or hear any in the film). In fact, it seems that most people treat the Purge with an almost religious fervor, mouthing party-line slogans about purifying the soul. In case you didn't do the math, all this is supposed to be just a mere 9 years from now.

(Download The Purge) Our window on this world is an upper-middle class family headed up by the status and money chasing salesman James Sandin (Ethan Hawke). He's made a killing selling expensive security systems to other families like his, including most of his neighbors. Wife Mary (Lena Headey) appears to have some reservations about the Purge and the way her family profits from it,(Download The Purge) but for the most part keeps them to herself. Teenage Zoey (Adelaide Kane) is more concerned with her father's efforts to prevent her from seeing boyfriend Henry (Tony Oller) than any bigger moral questions, leaving the youngest Sandin, Charlie (Max Burkholder), to act as the moral center of the family when a potential victim of the purge (Edwin Hodge) comes seeking shelter from his attackers.

(Download The Purge) THE PURGE asks its audience to swallow an awful lot of implausible nonsense, but it's possible to suspend disbelief for just about anything if it's done well enough. After all, revered as it is, Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone served up some pretty ridiculous premises from which to hang its social commentaries at times.(Download The Purge) Because the acting, directing, and writing on Zone were generally of such a high caliber, though, you could overlook some of the more preposterous plot elements.

(Download The Purge) Writer/director James DeMonaco is no Rod Serling, though. He's no Paul Bartel for that matter, either. If he were, he might have realized that treating this material as more of a black comedy, as Bartel did in the similarly themed DEATH RACE 2000, might have made its utter ridiculousness easier to buy into while still allowing room for a message via satire. But no, for the most part DeMonaco takes a very solemn tone, as if what he's depicting is some real, literal, and imminent danger.

(Download The Purge) Aside from pointing out humanity's inherent bloodlust, DeMonaco also uses his film to comment on upper middle class greed and status chasing, familial discord, and the way veterans are mistreated after doing their service, all of which winds up getting kind of muddled. And then there's the inherent hypocrisy of making a movie that takes an anti-violence stance on the one hand, but then includes multiple scenes intended to get the audience cheering when the “good” characters kill the “bad” ones.

(Download The Purge) The film's only real entertainment value comes from a pair of scenery chewing performances straight out of an eighties B movie. Hawke provides one of them, all swaggering arrogant tool at first, then morphing into a frantic parent fighting for the lives of his family once their home comes under attack. The film's MVP, however, is Rhys Wakefield as the leader of the gang besieging the Sandin family.(Download The Purge) Said gang is essentially the rich kids' fraternity from every eighties teen comedy ever made if they decided to wear the masks from THE STRANGERS and become one of the gangs from THE WARRIORS. As their leader, Wakefield goes full-on movie psycho while still embodying the kind of privileged douche-baggery one would expect from a character giving Robert Carradine a wedgie.

(Download The Purge) Outside of those two bright spots, the rest of the film is pretty tepid stuff. Once you get past premise, which we've already seen variation of in everything from the aforementioned DEATH RACE 2000 to the recent hit THE HUNGER GAMES, the film settles into being a run-of-the-mill riff on the old “family fighting back against a home invasion” subgenre (see LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE).(Download The Purge) But since the film isn't willing to go all the way with the potential transgressiveness and exploitation sleaze of its premise, nor is it willing to fully embrace its potential for camp, it winds up a mediocre bore that never quite finds a consistent tone or makes its point with any degree of impact.

(Download The Purge) I’ve been looking forward to this movie for a while; as soon as I saw the first trailer I thought it had an excellent concept and it still does, the idea that there are 12 hours where people can do whatever they want without consequences is an original and potentially fantastic idea for a movie.

(Download The Purge) Sadly, The Purge is pretty much another home invasion movie and really doesn’t use its great concept to its best potential. That’s not to say it’s a bad film, it isn’t; in fact it’s one of the most tense thrillers I’ve seen in a long time.

(Download The Purge) From the very beginning it oozes dread and you know that some nasty stuff is going to happen… but it never really does. Most of the violence you see is on CCTV cameras and it doesn’t go into enough depth exploring what’s going on outside of the house.

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(Download The Purge) What does happen in the house does get pretty nightmarish but I can’t help feeling that it was done better in The Strangers a few years back. It’s that sort of film but there is a little more to it.

(Download The Purge) I like how the parents played by Ethan Hawke and Lena Heady are both pretty nonchalant about the “purging” and they say how they have never had any of the urges to kill and yet as soon as they are pushed Ethan Hawke’s character is no better than the others. He turns into an animal without much provocation.

(Download The Purge) Now this I had a problem with; the absolute dick of a son called Charlie opens the door when he sees a homeless guy calling for help, despite the fact he knows what is going on outside. I found it really hard to believe that anyone would be THAT stupid and I just wanted the character to die so badly. It’s basically his fault that his family end up in a serious mess.

(Download The Purge) The performances all round are pretty awesome and Ethan Hawke really is proving himself a bit of a horror legend these days with this and Sinister. Lena Heady is great in any kind of role but her character has a few layers in this tale which makes her more interesting than just playing “the wife”. She essentially becomes the conscience of the family along with Charlie.

(Download The Purge) The movie belongs to Rhys Wakefield who plays a character known simply as “Polite Stranger”. He is the creepiest thing in this movie and all I thought when I saw him was “this guy HAS to play The Joker someday. It’s a shame his character is actually a little underused but any time he is on screen your heart is in your mouth.

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(Download The Purge) There is plenty of violence in the movie and it is a little hard to watch in places, but there’s very little that shocks me so I had fun with it.

(Download The Purge) Overall, The Purge is almost unbearably tense in places with strong performances from the whole cast and an excellent concept; it’s just a shame it ends up as a standard home invasion movie with a few neat twists. Give it a rental.

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