The Purge (2013) Dir: James DeMonaco
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James DeMonaco's 2013 horror is one that has an interesting place in pop-culture, in which it has become vastly popular, not really because of its critical acclaim, but because of its immense world building, which mixes a seemingly absurd premise with incredibly poignant and relevant social commentary on topics such as class divide, patriotism, morality and ethics.
The film had a pretty strong start, with some genuinely haunting shots during the opening credits, that worked both as exposition and mood-setters for the film. I think that this, along witha lot of the rest of the film's content, in fairness, helped cultivate a pretty consistent feel of realism in the story.
The film had some solid, though not exceptional action sequences. Considering the nature of the story, I also expected the film to be far more violent than it was, although I'm not saying a more gratuitous take would have necessarily been better.
At its base level, this is a home invasion horror film, but the aforementioned world building provides a hugely enjoyable and intriguing level of context to the story, and allows it to feel extremely unique, despite the fact that the film doesn't actually do much different from other home invasion stories.
Ethan Hawke leads the way, in both screentime and performance quality. He was by far the most consistent actor, and used his quality to help show the depth needed to make his character likable.
Lena Headey, Max Burkholder and Adelaide Kane all felt a lot more empty, in terms of their characters. I didn't mind their acting, but the writing let them all down. I didn't really care about them, at least as much as Hawke's character, because there wasn't much to care about. Headey was slightly less affected by this than her on-screen children, at least.
Both Edwin Hodge and Rhys Wakefield deserved way more screentime than either of them got, particularly considering that they were arguably the film's most interesting characters. When they were on screen though, they were at least able to give memorable and relatively strong performances.
Overall, while this film has some genuinely brilliant, and quite frankly harrowing, social commentary and themes, I never felt like the film capitalised fully on its iconic premise. I still enjoyed it, as I have done previously, but I feel like there was more that could have been done - there was certainly some missed potential.
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