THE PURGE

I saw THE PURGE yesterday. This is a movie that tries to mix the movies Panic Room with Children of the Corn and Escape from New York. The result looks pretty good... in the trailer that is. Outside of that its not so good. The Film stars Ethan Hawke and Lena Headley who play an affluent couple digging in to protect their home and family from home invaders on the one night a year where in which all crime is legal. On the plus side, Headley and Hawke do very well in this; the premise and some of the social questions asked during the film are interesting no doubt, BUT for me thats about where the positive ended. On the bad side the characters, the dialogue and the acting on the part of the invaders and quite literally everyone else in the cast was so thoroughly incompetently written, directed and acted that it took me out of the movie. Its like Hawke and Headley were doing a favor for somebody important in Hollywood. TIRED Hollywood cliches and meaningless 'artistic' flourishes designed to be creepy flat out ruined any sense of tension or danger in this film and I frequently caught myself throwing my hands up in the air and almost shouting at the screen. Like I said before, Lena Headley and Ethan Hawke are both good here but pretty much everything else here was high school theater. The Purge gets a 2... out of 5.