Thriller potential shot dead

Thriller potential shot dead

Review Thriller

THE PURGE (NC16)

Duration: 85 minutes/Opens on Wednesday

Rating: 2.5/5

The story: A few years in the future, crime has been largely eradicated because one night each year, all citizens are allowed to go berserk without legal consequences. James Sandin (Ethan Hawke) lives in an exclusive gated community with wife Mary (Lena Headey) and children. On Purge night, he locks down their fortress-like home, but things go awry after son Charlie (Max Burkeholder) allows an intruder to enter.

Somewhere in here is a dark and deliciously nasty story about the weirdness that can be unleashed if for just one day, people's impulses for murder, revenge, rape and pillage are given free rein.

But if that kernel ever existed, it is now buried under gunfights and family-bonding sentimentality.

Cowardice, laziness or avarice? All three, most likely. It has turned a film with a potentially riveting Twilight Zone-ish premise into a generic home-invasion shoot-'em-up.

There is a bit of Panic Room (2002) here, mixed with the masked stranger-danger of Halloween (1978), as well as ideas borrowed from a dozen other films.

It could have gone so well. Tearing away the veil that hides the barbarism that throbs beneath the veneer of civilisation is an evergreen subject of drama.

This work puts an intriguing new twist on it, by adding the element of the cruelty being allowed, even encouraged. Going wild for one night makes a citizen mild the rest of the year, goes the reasoning.

It is a highly implausible notion (even its writer- director James DeMonaco thinks so), but then so is the notion of, say, time travel.

Except stories based on the idea of time travel generally use it to create thought-provoking paradoxes, not highlight the single most important feature of the story, then fling it away.

DeMonaco uses flashbacks and fictional news footage to give ominous foreshadowing as to what might happen, then appears to lose faith in his concept after the first third of the movie.

Instead of showing what might happen if a nation becomes one large gladiatorial arena or Roman orgy, or better yet, something more sinister, it descends into a whack-a-mole game with guns.

There is a hint of the original concept at the start, when someone close to the family turns on the Sandins. This happens again a few more times, with different groups of people.

The problem here is not the dull notion that middle-class folks harbour a thirst for blood and vengeance, or that there is a heavy-handed hint that society's most ruthless predators are the wealthy. The real issue is the sudden and complete personality change that occurs when privileged folks drop their polite facades to reveal their villainous true selves.

When soccer moms and frat boys instantly transform into shrieking ninja assassins and cackling psychopaths, it is hard not to giggle.


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