Murder isn’t the only compelling crime
Purge movies can make better use of premise
The premise of The Purge is ingeniously simple: for 12 hours every year, all crime in its near-future America is legal. The idea bristles with intrigue, and, indeed, its appeal is largely speculative. The question it implicitly poses is what you might do if anything and everything were totally permitted. What could you take for yourself ? What dreams of vengeance could you realize? What could you accomplish if all forbidden means were briefly encouraged? To invoke a cliché that seems apt given the concept: what would you do if the possibilities were limitless?
Alas, this vision wasn’t realized.
The first Purge picture, it was widely felt at the time, squandered its juicy potential, reducing the seemingly endless prospects afforded by its high concept to slashermovie inanity, the entirety of its action relegated to the inside of one suburban house. This was chiefly a problem of scale — a case of a big idea squeezed into a small film — owing, it seemed, to the limitations of its meagre budget.
The Purge was the product of Jason Blum, a shrewd producer whose low- risk, high-return investments over the last several years have made his company, Blumhouse Productions, a major Hollywood success story. The Blumhouse model has proven enormously lucrative, and The Purge is no exception. Its $3-million budget yielded a nearly $90-million return. The breadth promised by The Purge’s core idea may have been hobbled by the restrictions of this approach, but at least commercially it paid off.
For anyone disappointed by the first film’s wasted potential, word that a sequel to The Purge was being produced at triple the budget was heartening. There was still so much to be done with this material, and if the premise were properly capitalized on, a second Purge may well have made up for the paucity of the first. Perhaps the scale of the film would finally match the breadth of its central idea: perhaps a smorgasbord of criminal activity would hit the screen with unorthodox verve.
To that end, The Purge: Anarchy began promisingly. It opens in the smoggy blankness of Los Angeles, on March 21st, 2023 — a f ew hours before “Commencement,” when t he annual 12- hour Purge officially begins. We’re introduced to a half- dozen of the city’s fretting denizens as they prepare to survive the night, boarding up doors and speaking i n hushed tones of the mayhem soon to come. The director, James DeMonaco, spends a lot of time touring L. A.’s rapidly emptying streets, swooping around with aerial shots, and you get the tantalizing sense that all this sprawl is being primed for good use; that DeMonaco is giving us an opportunity to enjoy the city before it’s overrun by the unchecked imagination of a populace free to break the law. This, you sort of think, is the Purge we’ve been waiting for: anarchy not confined to one home, but to a metropolis entire.
But then the other shoe drops. DeMonaco’s liberated city, it turns out, isn’t so much overrun as gingerly ambled through, vacant except for a few nondescript bikers with machine guns and, of course, our unwitting heroes, forced out into the streets under wildly unbelievable circumstances.
The broadened scale of the city proves nothing more than an illusion. Though the action largely takes place outdoors rather than in, it is still the same dismal spectacle as was indulged by Purge the first. DeMonaco equips his characters with a few guns, a straightforward objective ( reach safety, boringly), and simply sends them on their way, resigned to alternately shoot and run until time elapses. Screaming, killing and trying to avoid getting killed themselves are all this lot are good for.
The Purge: Election Year, instalment three in this unlikely trilogy, does … exactly the same thing as the first two Purge films, almost beat by beat. This time around the action begins in a house (with a defiant anti-Purge U.S. Senator under guard in her home for the evening) and meanders into the streets later on, with the same stultifying, nondescript results. People are murdered in a number of brutal ways. Kidnappings are rampant. Violence is inflicted with unapologetic glee.
The limitations, in other words, aren’t budgetary so much as imaginative. It’s a baffling failure of thought. The premise of the film tells us that for 12 hours a year, all crime is legal, but in the Purge films “all crime” is something of a misnomer. All crime is legal, people! All of it!
Go out and do something interesting: forge, embezzle, perjure, extort, conspire, racketeer! I want to see a Purge movie about usury or jaywalking or defamation of character. What about someone committing insurance fraud? Making moonshine? Illegally downloading previous Purge films? I mean, do you have any idea how many f ascinating things are against the law? The floodgates are open for the night. Go out and dispose of a corpse with intent to obstruct or prevent a coroner’s inquest.
Crime, as we can well imagine, is a broad category: it includes everything from tax evasion to grand larceny. And yet it seems that in The Purge universe, the only crime anybody is interested in is murder. That’s a major one, certainly — and thinning out the populace, the franchise suggests, is part of the point of the annual Purge. But the fact that a character never once thinks to take advantage of this special period to do something more creative than kill another person seems astoundingly short- sighted. Where’s the ingenuity, the vision, the wit?
I get that killing is an action movie’s bread and butter, but with news of yet another Purge sequel on its way — The Island, this one is called, not promisingly — we have to hope that in the very least the inevitable violent crime is a little more creative.