The purge

I was not excited for this movie when I got to the movie theater last night to watch this movie. From the trailers for the movie it looked like a boring rehash of the same kind of thriller where there are a few unique death scenes and maybe some nudity and then 90 minutes or so later they wrap it up poorly. I thought about it during the movie more deeply and I came to the realization that the story had more teeth to it than that. The thought process for this movie was the logical conclusion to the Republican ideology. The people who make a lot of money should be protected and the people who don’t need to work harder and pick themselves up to be successful. The term for this kind of sending an argument to absurdity is called reduction ad absurdum. That is a Latin mouthful but it means to reduce an argument or hypothesis to absurdity, by pushing the arguments, premises or conclusions to their logical limits and showing how ridiculous the consequences would be, thus disproving or discrediting the argument. I think that is some fertile ground to get a movie into and can lead to hard questions being asked that could lead to some genuine thought provoking material but it fizzled at the hands of the people involved of making this movie. There was an offshoot story line that involved Ethan Hawkes’ characters daughter and her boyfriend that I felt was thrown in to make the political undertones less on the nose and to add some minutes to a very short running time. I think this movie could have been good with a more capable writer/director teaming behind the scenes. Overall I did enjoy this movie but it is one of those disappointing movies that you know could have been much more than it was. Ethan Hawke turned in a believable performance while some of the other actors were not that good. This movie could have benefited greatly from a few more stars attached to it because the story just wasn’t enough for some of the lesser known actors in this movie. I would give this movie 6 out of 10 because it was a fun watch and I look forward to seeing scenes in passing on movie channels in the future. Here are links to the trailer and different reviews on this movie.

http://www.fandango.com/movie-trailer/thepurge-trailer/161109
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_purge/