The Purge TV Show

Purge Resurge

The Purge TV Show
Season 1
Sept 4th - Nov 6th 2018 - 10 episodes
Season 2
Oct 15th - Dec 17th 2019 10 episodes

Warning: Very mild spoilers.

Okay, so I quite like the majority of The Purge movies because the old school sci-fi concept is sound and they manage to do something a little different with each one. In terms of turning this film series of sci-fi thrillers into a TV show goes... I was not optimistic. Not all but, most TV adaptations of successful movies are generally soaped up, pale shades of their source material but, I figured I’d maybe give the first episode of The Purge TV show a go just in case.

Well, I was so surprised by this. Not only are both series absolutely brilliant and just as scary as the movies, they also manage to do something slightly different from each other and I really loved this show. Both seasons are connected only by the concept of The Purge and Dermot Mulroney pops up in both as a DJ  presenter, pumping up his listeners to go out into the streets to purge. And the main cast of characters on each season is completely different from the other, with no other connects and with very different storylines.

The first season does more or less what you think it will do and it mostly takes place on a purge night (both seasons are set somewhere between the second and third movie). This one sets up a few major character strands...

So most of the first episode is set within a few hours before the Annual Purge. We have Jessica Garza as Penelope. She has sent her ex-marine brother a note, basically saying good bye as she is part of a religious cult who drive around on purge night in a bus, giving themselves to purgers as a sacrifice (and, of course, you know her mindset on that issue is going to change once she is in the thick of it and discovers the corruption and real motive behind the cult). Then we have her brother Miguel, played by Gabriel Chavarria, who is it on the streets trying to track down his sister before she gets killed.

We next have a young couple played by Hannah Emily Anderson and Colin Woodell, who are invited to a purge party by the National Founding Fathers (the NFF, a political power who created and implement the annual purge) and they accept because they need to get money for their company from the man running the party. They once had an awkward sexual threesome with a girl played by Lili Simmons, who they think is in another country but she’s not, she’s at the party... and she’s the daughter of the man they are depending on for financing.

And then there’s a young, ambitious office worker played by Amanda Warren, who is working with her colleagues in a locked down office building on purge night but who has arranged a ‘hit by proxy’ on her boss (played by William Baldwin). Something she now regrets and wants to prevent.

Finally, there’s a guy called Joe, played by Lee Tergesen. He is fully kitted out for purge night and is going around rescuing various people on his special list and taking them to safety... including, it turns out, all of the characters I’ve mentioned so far. However, as you might expect, he has a slightly more sinister motivation for his actions and, by the final couple of episodes, it turns out he’s an even bigger threat than some of the horrendous, violent individuals the other come into contact with throughout the night.

So, yeah, the next nine episodes of series one are basically playing out like a Purge movie except there’s more time to explore various concepts like a ‘kill carnival’, a raid on a ‘purge party’ and a sexualised trap for women etc. The cinematography and lighting is all great and, yeah, it feels dangerous. My only real problem with the first season was the constant flashbacks to the sexual threesome because, bizarrely, everyone is naked but you don’t actually see anybody’s sexual organs. It just looks unnatural and wrong and I wish they had just alluded to it instead of pretending to show it because, yeah, this is how not to do a sex scene in a TV show or movie. The violence is pretty gruesome though, it has to be said, possibly more so than the movies, if you're into that element of it.

As you would expect, some of these characters survive the purge, others don’t and, after a brief wind up so that you can see what any survivors are doing in the wake of the purge followed by a quick lead in showing what two of them are up to for the next purge, the show ends. And its brilliant but, rather than continuing with these surviving characters, the second show does something different again.

Okay, so three quarters of the first episode of season two takes place over the last two hours of purge night, where the main characters are initially set up...

There’s Esme, played by Paola Nuñez. She is part of a government group who monitors the purge from an office of screens to ensure nothing illegal (well, more illegal) takes place and nothing goes against the accepted rules. However, she sees something amiss which ultimately leads to finding information that the NFF are basically killing people ‘off-purge’ because of certain psychological findings about the national holiday and she ends up as America’s most wanted fugitive for her trouble. With all her surveillance equipment and her paranoia, it starts off in similar territory to Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Conversation before, turning into something far more worrying.

Then we have Joel Allen who is out on purge when he doesn’t want to be, is left behind by his college room mate and almost gets killed. However, killing his assailant leads to an addiction to violence and he becomes an off-purge serial killer for the rest of the series.

We have Marcus, played by Derek Luke and his wife. Someone has put a ‘purge bounty’ out on Marcus but, will he find out who and somehow be able to get it removed before the next annual purge?

And finally we have Ryan, played by Max Martini. He and his ex-cop colleagues are bank robbers (they don’t want to kill but want to legally steal as much money as they can each purge). Something goes wrong in the first episode for them, which leads to an elabourate plan that takes the next year to finesse, ostensibly to get the haul of their lives but, there are other complications too.

And it’s another humdinger of a show. Unlike the first season, where all the character strands converge for the final two episodes, this one has the different strands often rubbing together and crossing paths but never quite all at the same time... although the aftermath of a tragic event where my two favourite characters are killed in the last episode certainly joins up a lot of them and their surrounding co-stars.

The real difference of the second season, though, is that most of the episodes take place in the year between two purges. So after the climax of one purge, it’s not actually until right at the end of episode seven that the next one commences, leaving the last two installments to play out like a standard purge movie but with all the background of the characters developed before hand. And, once again, it shows us different aspects of the purge and what people do when they’re not purging, such as elaborate purge themed game booths where you can virtually kill people or hiring animals to slaughter to vent your violent tendencies between the annual holidays.

Another nice thing about the second season is that each starts off with a pre-credits scene which has nothing to do with the main story and shows us a different aspect of The Purge. For the first one, for example, the lady who provides the regular voice-over ‘yearly introductory warning’ to the event is seen auditioning for the voice role and questioning her lines. Another one in the last episode, set just before the first purge, has a nice little cameo from Ethan Hawke, reprising the ill fated character he played in the first movie. And generally, most of these intro sequences come off like the satirical scenes in the first Robocop movie (the original, not the stupid remake) and give the show a little more of a dark edge, shot through with some very cynical humour.

And, yeah, that’s me done with The Purge TV show. I wish this show hadn’t been cancelled because it’s just as good as the movies (and in the case of the first and fourth movies, this show is way better). This is something which really does go hand in hand with the film series and, to boot, has the time to explore some of the concepts it brings to the table in a little more detail than the films are able to do. This one had me gripped from the start and, certainly, if you like the movies then I would recommend you take a look at the series too.

The Forever Purge

Purge, Less Merry Death*

The Forever Purge
USA/Mexico/France 2021
Directed by Everardo Gout
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Some light spoilerage, perhaps.

Seems like, no matter what I’m looking at for this blog, it’s inevitable that at some point I’ll be reviewing another Purge movie. The Forever Purge is the fifth and, possibly, the final film of The Purge franchise (to date, I can’t help but think this isn’t over yet) and I’ve had a kind of love/hate relationship with the series of films since the beginning. The concept of a film where, for a 12 hour period each year, the people of America are encouraged to kill and rob each other as an outlet to keep crime figures low, was originally inspired by the old, classic Star Trek episode The Return Of The Archons (which I think is yet another episode where Kirk blows up a computer). The films are technically slick doses of ‘designer grimy’ ultra-violence which are a double edged sword because, they are genuinely scary to people like me and remind me that weapons of all kind are to be feared. And while that general message of the films, that violent conflict is bad, is usually pushed... at the same time, they also revel in that violence and its always my fear that there is a significant faction of the audience who respond to these as the glorification of violence. Either reaction is fine to an extent, films are entertainment and they’re also art... doing what art does... but the little bit of the Venn diagram of viewers who overlap into actually acting out this stuff in real life are the ones that worry me... especially in the heightened, sensitive state the world seems to have entered over the last five years or so.

So The Forever Purge follows the original The Purge (reviewed here) which had probably the best and more high profile actors... it introduced the audience to the concept and it was okay but, a little mean spirited for my liking and, ultimately, just a little worrying that audiences responded so favourably to it. Then we got the direct sequel, The Purge - Anarchy (reviewed here) which really upped its game, giving us a great, entertaining movie reminiscent of those old, early 1970s hard-edged, violent science-fiction thrillers. I loved this one and the next sequel, The Purge - Election Year (reviewed here) was also pretty good, following a politician’s attempts to finally bring an end to these ridiculous purges. Then we had the prequel, The First Purge (reviewed here), which was a real low point of the series as far as I am concerned. It tried to tackle the racism inherent in society but in such a way that anybody white was evil and everybody else was good. It’s probably one of the most racist movies I’ve seen but, hey, some people liked it and I’m tolerant of that. Tolerance seems to be a key ingredient which is missing from most youngsters vocabulary these days and... yeah, that’s the scary thing.

The Forever Purge, set after the annual purge has been reinstated (which may be something covered in the recent TV show of The Purge, I haven’t seen that yet), also tackles racism but does it really well and smartly, bringing home the message that everyone should be treated equally. This one involves three main protagonists and their friends and family. We have Juan, played by Tenoch Huerta, who illegally crosses into America, fleeing the drug cartels of Mexico, in the film’s pre-credits sequence... along with his lover, the truly kick-ass Adela, played by the remarkable Ana de la Reguera... who is honestly the best thing about this film. Her background story is that she used to be part of a resistance group fighting the drug cartels before things just got too hot to stay in Mexico. Now Juan works in a ranch owned by Dylan and his father.

Dylan’s father is played by the always watchable Will Patton. As soon as I saw he was in the movie I was pretty sure that one of two things could happen with his character. Either he’d be nice to everyone and then, in the final act, turn out to be the mastermind villain behind whatever trouble is being caused in this one or he would have a stand up, doing what’s right moment and be the first victim of the film, to motivate the other characters. And... sure, one of these two things does indeed happen.

Dylan himself is played by Josh Lucas and he doesn’t really like Juan. He’s one of those ‘I’m not racist but...’ kind of people but, when he talks about this near the end of the movie, he’s pitched in and the two characters have each other’s back in a respectful bonding series of moments... just like you know they would, as they grow tolerant of each other (there’s that word again) and work together to get the rest of their people to safety. It’s pretty clear that Dylan wouldn’t have made it out of America alive if it weren’t for Juan and Adela. Wait, what? Get out of America? Okay, here’s the next twist on a franchise which is just about managing to reinvent itself in each installment.

This film initially takes place in Texas, just before and during the annual purge, just like the others. It does the usual set ups and then the violence begins and, before you know it, maybe half an hour into the movie, the purge runs its course and finishes the next day at 7am. Woah.... that was quick, I thought. What happened to the rest of the film? Then we find that a very large, organised bunch of racists who are intent on carrying on the purge forever are overrunning the country with the express purpose of purifying it for ‘true americans’ and killing all the immigrants etc. After rescuing the majority of Dylan’s people from a bunch of ranch workers and then reuniting with Adela, it’s up to Juan and his friends to get everybody to the Mexican border before it’s shut, as it’s been opened to fleeing Americans for a few hours as the whole of America becomes one huge civil war zone, with the military and police crumbling to the ‘Forever Purgers’. So it’s a race to get to the border while they are allowed into Mexico.

And it’s a well put together movie. It says a lot about the violence and wrong people do each other while, as it always does, presenting that violence in as visceral and suspenseful way as it can. There’s a truly terrifying moment when Adela and her friend are locked in the back of a police van with two purgers and the big bear of a guy in there with them starts identifying all the different guns shots being fired on the street and then conducting them like an orchestra as the different noises bring their own percussive rhythms. It only lasts for maybe a minute or, possibly, two but it’s the sequence in the movie for me which really brings home the terrifying message that there are idiots out there who are totally into all the violence and chaos and, yeah, for me the message of the films is blown up larger than life right here. It also has an old school ‘cowboys and indians’ style shoot out in the desert by the Mexican border too, at the end so, yeah, it strays into Western territory a little... which is cool.

The film is totally entertaining and, despite some really low IMDB review scores, which I suspect says a hell of a lot more about the people writing the reviews than it does the film itself (are people really this afraid of racial equality being pushed as a message?), I think it’s one of the best films in the series. I also like how it ushers in the end of the American way of life while also giving hope, if you can call it that, of a sequel... as it’s hinted that a full on civil war has begun in the US as people start fighting back against the ‘forever purgers’. Note to the censorous BBFC though... I really don't need to be warned in the certification that the film contains 'racism.' Honestly, if people are that dumb and sensitive that they feel they need to be warned about it, they shouldn't be allowed to look at any kind of art in the first place.

And not much more to say than that, other than The Forever Purge is a nice place to wrap the series up if that happens and, if you’re already a fan of the films, then you should be pretty happy with the way this one goes down, I suspect. I would be happy to watch this and the others again at some point so I hope they release a five movie boxed edition of Blu Rays sometime soon.

*Yeah... I wish Burgess Meredith could be referenced in these films so my title would make more sense... but, what the hell, I did it anyway.

The Purge: Anarchy

Unexpurgated

The Purge: Anarchy
2014 USA/France
Directed by James DeMonaco
Cinema release print.

It’s funny. Although it was only last year, I thought I'd remembered not really being overly fond of The Purge, the first movie in this series. However, I just looked back at the review I wrote of that one (which you can find here) and I actually didn’t give it a bad write up. I was quite defensive about it on some points and, interestingly, one of the points I was going to push in my review of this film, also is pre-empted by me in that initial review. I also picked up on a fair few problems with that first movie and, I have to say, at least one of those problems is repeated in this one too.

The Purge: Anarchy retains none of the characters of the first film and is set one year after the events of that first installment, in the year 2023. It takes the central premise from the original, a twelve hour Government sanctioned period where any crime, including murder, is legal... to keep the crime rate down for the rest of the year... and runs with it. Now it doesn’t expand a great deal on the initial idea but, what it does do, is it explores the obvious symptoms of The Purge and also enhances the, perhaps somewhat obvious, hidden agenda as to why the government wants these annual purges happening.

While the first movie was pretty much a siege turns into a home invasion movie... this installment plays out as the absolute opposite of that tactic. It concerns multiple sets of characters who are, for whatever reason, out on the streets and trying to get to shelter while trying to survive the animalistic death orgy that is the annual “purge”. This surprised me somewhat because I thought it was going to just be a slightly altered re-tread of the first one and, while I had obvious reservations about that, this one really appealed to me and I enjoyed this a whole lot better than the original... despite the fact that Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey weren’t in this one.

It’s an ensemble piece, of course, and the various protagonists are all pretty strong in this. My particular favourite was the main antihero character “Sergeant”... played with great presence by Frank Grillo, who played one of the main "H.Y.D.R.A inside S.H.I.E.L.D" bad guys in the last Captain America movie (reviewed here). He does an absolutely bang up job as a tight lipped, no nonsense, knight in tainted armour killing machine and I read just today that the majority of his dialogue, including his back story, was cut from the movie. Now this is interesting because I bet he wouldn’t have been as half an interesting or compelling character if he’d been talking all the way through so I find it interesting that an already good performance can be strengthened via the “less is more” route in the editing.

I was thinking all the way through the film that, if this had been shot in the late 1960s or early 1970s, this central character would have been played by either Charlton Heston or Yul Brynner... because this is exactly the sort of violent, dystopian science fiction thriller that they would have both had lent their talents to... although I’m not sure Heston would have liked the underlying message of the movie. I touched on this in my review of the first movie but The Purge: Anarchy is very much in synch with the story and attitude to specific films like Planet Of The Apes, The Omega Man, Rollerball, Soylent Green, Westworld and The Ultimate Warrior... almost all of which starred either Heston or Brynner, of course (the exception being Rollerball). I guess a late 1970s/early 1980s comparison could also be made via films like The Warriors and Escape From New York. Just a small bunch of individuals trying to survive a night in the city. Always good for a “hang any action stealth/chase sequence you like on it” kind of plot and these kinds of films can be kind of entertaining (although I seem to remember not thinking much of The Warriors when I saw it back in the heady days of “the video rental age”).

While the film is violent, the concept is pushed out just a little bit to include an anti-Purge faction and what I can only describe as a Government “enhancement” group... in that the government are found to be slaughtering citizens wholesale as an augmentation to the purge because they are required to keep the population down. There’s always a reason that Governments pass these stupidly Draconian laws and, while the reasons are left pretty much to your own speculation in the first movie, this one blatantly comes out with the idea near the end of the movie.

The class structure is once again explored, in this one. There’s even a big tip of the hat to The Most Dangerous Game (aka The Hounds Of Zaroff) in that a whole load of people are captured and taken to a wealthy mansion and courtyard area where rich people bid vast sums to hunt and purge on the poor, huddled and, obviously, unarmed masses in a controlled area with the added advantage of the latest state of the art weaponry. Of course, if this sounds too much like shooting fish in a barrel well... don’t worry, it is... but it’s Hollywoodland time here so, you know, I don’t want to say too much about what happens in this scene but it certainly relates to my next paragraph.

The one problematic thing about this movie, which is also very much a hang over from the first film, as far as I remember, is the number of “deux ex machina” style moments where someone is saved from certain death by the intervention of another character or group of characters the audience had temporarily forgotten about. Like the first film, there’s just way too many of these moments in this one but I have to cut it a little slack because I guess there’s more chance of that kind of thing happening when you’re working on a bigger canvas and not confined to fighting your battles inside a small home. I do, though, think these moments do become quite tiresome, repetitive and increasingly unbelievable as the movie progresses to its final conclusion.

However, this is small price to pay for a film which holds, as its central idea, the concept that guns and violence are a bad thing and I am once again amazed that a film which is so blatantly anti-gun law and opposed to “the right to bear arms” is not heavily snipped by the American censors. Sure, the film revels in violence (well, violence in art is quite often very watchable, to be fair) and it does the obvious thing of trying to have it’s cake and eat it in terms of the play off between the violent nature of the film and the underlying message of anti-violence but, as far as I’m concerned, the subtext of the movie, which is reenforced by the action, or should that be inaction, of one of the lead characters near the films denouement, kind of wins my heart over on this one. As far as I’m concerned, this can only be a good thing and I just hope that all this doesn’t go over the heads of a the teenage audience that these kinds of entertainments are primarily aimed at.

The Purge: Anarchy is a nice bit of violent science-fiction that preserves the lineage I outlined earlier in this review without missing the point of some of those films. It’s a much more entertaining and thoughtful, if not overly subtle, tale than its predecessor and if you are into these kinds of action fests then you will probably be into this one. Definitely something I will catch again in the next couple of years.

The Purge

Like A Purging

The Purge 
2013 USA/France
Directed by James DeMonaco
Playing at cinemas now.

Warning: There will be spoilers purging themselves 
randomly in this review. You have been warned.

I really like Ethan Hawke but there aren’t that many movies I actually get to see with him in these days. All his best ones are directed by Richard Linklater and the horror movie Sinister, which he toplined last year, kinda disappointed me somewhat (my review here). However, I’d seen some people on twitter talking about a new movie called The Purge which, somehow, I was completely unaware of. I checked out the trailer online after this and thought I’d give it a go.

Now there have been a lot of negative reviews on this one over the last week or so, which makes me kinda grateful that the two people on twitter who had the conversation I was watching were among the few people who'd taken a relatively positive experience away from this movie... otherwise I probably wouldn’t have bothered to pursue this one, if I’m being truthful. As it stands, I did have a fair few problems with this movie myself but I do think it’s being unfairly criticised at the moment by people maybe expecting something different from what it delivers and although there was some not great stuff going on with it, it also had some really strong points to it as well so... I think this is really going to be a little bit of a defence of the movie too, to an extent.

The appeal for me on this one for example, apart from Ethan Hawke being a cool dude in most of the films I’d seen him in, was that the basic idea for the movie, of having an “all crime including murder goes legal” for 12 hours a year event, was exactly the kind of gritty conceptual science-fiction concept that Hollywood used to make so well back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. You know the kinds of movies I mean. I’m talking stuff like Planet Of The Apes, Rollerball, The Omega Man, The Ultimate Warrior, Soylent Green, Westworld, Demon Seed... stuff like that. Often they’d have someone like Chuck Heston or Yul Brinner running around in them... but not always.

Well I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised that this movie managed to maintain that kind of high concept, early 70s atmosphere for a lot of the movie. It’s not just a mindless bunch of action scenes thrown together... it does throw out questions about this near future society who choose to have an annual purge of savagery to keep the crime rate down and forces you, very simply, to question the moral dilemma of the main protagonists of this movie in a speculative setting which you wouldn’t be able to realistically explore in the confines of real life to this degree. And, of course, this is one of the main tenets of the best kind of science fiction... to explore basic questions, problems and dilemmas of the human condition in just this kind of speculative setting which allows you to scratch deeper into the surface of an idea than mere real life could.

So I was really happy that this film does confront certain questions of basic right and wrong and, frankly, very respectful of the decision of the writers/filmmakers to not take sides and draw their own conclusions for you. There’s no judgement held here, except for maybe the US constitution’s right to bear arms and, though this is firmly encapsulated into various character’s ways of life here, it rightly pails before the bigger questions like... is it right to sacrifice one human life in order to save your own and that of your loved ones? Happily, as I said, the film does not spoon feed you anything and lets the various visual calms between action sequences wash these kinds of ideas over you in a way that forces you to confront them yourself.

The downside of this is that like many high concept science fiction films where that simple idea is the driving force around the narrative, there’s not a heck of a lot else in the way of storyline to get to. The main meal is the concept and some people in today’s audiences, I suspect, are going to find it just a little too simplistic in comparison to what they’ve come to expect from a modern screen entertainment. It’s actually got a lot more meat to it than most celluloid dished these days but, because it just goes from A to B in a straightforward, linear fashion with no real surprises... I think a lot of people might switch off to this movie. I thought the basic plotting was fine though, precisely because it allowed the moral dilemmas to come to the fore and force you to think on your feet.

However, I did have massive problems with this movie too.

The first problem was predictability. There’s a character introduced very early on in the film and you just know that she and the local neighbours are going to come back towards the end of the movie and wind up trying to kill the main protagonists. She gives the wife, played by Lena Headey, a tin of home made cookies right at the start of the picture and already I was thinking... “Are those cookies going to turn out to be poisoned or something?” because you could tell by the way these characters were highlighted for just a little too much screen time that there was going to be some clash between them later on in the movie. This was a really obvious set up and I’d rather they would have introduced the concept of the neighbourhood second hand from the main protagonists and slowly revealed the jealousy and hate that was lurking there through the eyes of the family, rather than hit you on the head with it at the start of the picture.

The other two obvious things were that you knew Ethan Hawke’s daughter’s “forbidden boyfriend” would try to kill Hawke at some point and the fact that Hawke's young son had a mobile camera on tracks that he’d just upgraded to be equipped with night vision, meant that this gadget would also come back at some point as some kind of heroic rescue component in the latter stages of the film. And yeah, bingo, it did. It was like they wanted to be really obvious about spelling out all the traps and aids which the main family could ether fall into or use to their advantage later in the film and get it out of the way within the first 20 minutes of the running time. It all seemed so obvious and fake.

But, even with all that telegraphing in the earlier scenes, the film still went along and tried to “have its deus ex machina and eat it too” because there’s a sequence, a really intense  sequence actually, where the home invasion battle of the movie begins proper, and there was a kind of repeat motif going on about building up expectations of death and then swooping in to save the day. I honestly couldn’t count the number of times, but it was maybe four or five, when a family member got within an inch of death before somebody else walked into a room and instantly removed the danger with a few spare rounds of plentiful ammunition. Seriously people? I mean, yeah, you can maybe get away with it once if you’re going for that kind of “on-the-edge-of-your-seat” bluff but not four or five times a row in quick succession. After time number two, you stop getting worried... either something will happen to stop character Y killing character X or it wont... and it doesn’t matter anymore because it just feels like one big repetitive cheat. Which is a shame because a lot of the film is quite strong.

The cast are terrific, firstly... with special shout out going to some guy I’d not heard of before called Rhys Wakefield who played the main, lead villain as a kind of well spoken yuppie who you really want to see killed off as quickly as possible. Known in the cast as only “polite stranger” the juxtaposition of rich, well mannered breeding and unconcealed blood lust leaves a nasty taste on the tongue and this guy is obviously someone to watch out for in future movies... as long as he doesn’t manage to get himself typecast as playing villains all the time.

Asides from Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey, there’s also a “bloody stranger” who is played by a guy called Edwin Hodge... unfortunately his character is merely there as a catalyst for the problem our main protagonists are in and it’s so very obvious that he is going to end up shrugging off the treatment he suffers at the hands of these people (which is where the movie really starts to wallow in its shades of grey, quite successfully and mostly unflinchingly) and living up to his own moral code and turning up again like the cavalry in the last act. I wish the character hadn’t done that, in fact, because again it was so predictable but, predictable or not, he played the character well and made him someone likable to the audience... so you can at least emotionally invest in him when you need to. Job done on that count by a great little actor.

What I will say about the last half an hour or so, which is for me when the film really loses its moral edge for a little while (but makes up for it in bloody carnage), is that the stealth action sequences which mostly make up the climax of the movie are quite effective in their actual shooting and intensity... asides from the fistful of miracle rescue moments I was talking about earlier. There was one little sequence where Ethan Hawke ends up in hand to hand combat with about five of the “bad guys”, for example, which reminded me of that first, intense fight sequence in Kill Bill Vol. 1... the editing and sound design made it all quite brutal and in your face... well until the inevitable “quick save” moment.

The music, too, was pretty interesting. I remember it being fairly minimal and it blended nicely with that “final days of old Hollywood” sci-fi ambience which I believe it was half trying to emulate. I don’t think it’s going to be getting a stand alone release on CD which is a shame because I’d quite like to have a listen to this one properly, away from the movie. It serves it very well though and resists the temptation, in most places, to overstate the on-screen action too much.

The Purge is, frankly, not as great as it could have been but certainly not deserving of the flack it’s been getting from some quarters. If you are going there because it’s being sold almost as a horror film (from the producer of Paranormal Activity and Sinister, as the UK poster screams) then you’re probably going to be a little disappointed... but if you’re looking for a simple but strong conceptual sci-fi film and you don’t mind about the obligatory modern mass carnage element which the film inevitably builds up to, then it might be worth a smidgeon of your time to check this one out and purge a little.