WIHFL: The Purge (2013)
What I'm having fun with lately, 4/26/2024
There’s an astonishing five movies in the Purge franchise, at least three of which I’m pretty sure no one has seen. Starting with the original in 2013, the last film in the series so far is 2021’s The Forever Purge, the poster of which features a cowboy with a hatchet riding a horse wearing a skull, so that became our guiding light as we embarked.
Unless y’all cry mercy in the comments, I’m thinking the next few WIHFL posts will be my retrospective of this series that’s as iconic as it is totally forgotten. What cast my mind, what hue my thoughts as I open Prime Video and breathe deep the scent of 2013? Mostly it was, “Ethan Hawke??”
The Purge (2013)
I never saw any of these movies when they first came out, but I remember the premise: In the distant future of 2023, crime in the US is negligible, the economy is booming, and for 364 days out of the year everything by all accounts rules. Except for one day a year, the titular Purge, a 12-hour period in which all crime is legal.
Equally core to this premise is the idea that, given complete legal freedom, most people would instantly start murdering each other.
Even before the movie came out, I feel like people were making memes and demotivational posters (which was the style at the time) about how they would navigate the Purge. I found one LA Times article about how Twitter went nuts with this concept, under the unwieldy-but-quaint hashtag “#ifthepurgewashappeninginreallife.”
It instantly became classic, and I think has pretty much stayed that way. And it’s weird to think now that this just didn’t exist prior to the release of this movie, like how “bucket list” didn’t exist as a term until 2007’s The Bucket List. I give the movie a lot of credit for doing something actually new, even if it fails in other ways.
The Purge follows a very wealthy family in a very wealthy neighborhood, where doting patriarch James Sandin sells high-tech security equipment to other wealthy people. His defining trait, other than “dad,” is “holy shit that’s Ethan Hawke,” which I would have to imagine is where a big chunk of the movie’s $3 million budget went.
(Except, I just looked it up, apparently he worked for basically nothing because he’s besties with the producer!)
Otherwise it’s not a very standout cast, except for Rhys Wakefield, who played the movie’s total creep of an antagonist so hard that it maybe killed his career? At least, the first 10 or so results when I searched his name on Reddit were like “this guy should play the Joker.”
Anyway, the family is getting ready to batten down for the Purge, resulting in some surprisingly light-handed exposition about how this event came to be. Folks say things like, “Blessed be America, a nation reborn” and refer to New Founding Fathers — and for the most part, it doesn’t beat you over the head with monologues about the central premise. (Foreshadowing!)
All in all the movie runs a tight ship, taking place in one house over one night. And its central conflict is also super clear, with the Sandins forced to decide whether they’ll shelter an injured homeless man from the affluent teen psychopaths who want to hunt him. Commit indirect murder knowing you won’t face consequences, or risk a lot to save a life?
Everything else about the movie is just running the clock on this one question — and sometimes running out the clock when it struggles to fill runtime. Like, the Sandins’ daughter just sort of wanders around with a concussion for the whole middle of the movie, and occasionally someone has to run after her.
In the end, Ethan Hawke realizes that killing people isn’t good, and then he and a dual-pistol-toting Lena Headey do action movie stuff at the teens until they kill them all. But, twist! The neighbors are also psycho and want to ritually kill the Sandins. But then, oh my god another twist! The homeless guy (who they left tied up and duct taped even after deciding to spare him for some reason) pops out of the shadows and does action movie stuff at the neighbors until the Purge is over.
The moral of the story is fairy tale clear, which is that killing people is not OK even when you’re very rich. But interpreting this movie as Good Social Commentary requires a lot of charity.
Like, I’d be remiss not to mention that the only Black character in the movie is the homeless guy who acts scary then ultimately saves the film’s white protagonists. If I’m being charitable, then The Purge is commenting on how violence is enacted on racially as well as socioeconomically marginalized groups.
If I’m being a little more honest, though, it’s not great that this unnamed, unwritten character is just a stand-in for “the poor.” It’s also too simplistic to imagine, as this movie does, that the only crime anyone wants to commit is murder. Like, we don’t see anyone steal anything, even though that’s like the main thing I would want to be doing.
So as a social critique, it’s eh. But as a broad metaphor, and moreover as an action thriller, it kind of kicks ass? This, I think, is the spectrum on which all of the Purge movies are going to be judged: the harder they try to say something, the worse they get. On the other hand, the longer the camera hangs on masked private school kids menacingly swinging on swingsets, the better they get.
And dialing both of those notches to 11 gets you The Purge: Anarchy — which I look forward to reviewing in the next couple weeks.
What else I’m having fun with lately
D&D through fresh eyes. I’ve run a looooot of Dungeons & Dragons in the last seven years or so, but this past week I got to run for a group of brand new players. The session was a blast — never underestimate the restorative power of seeing your own hobby through eyes of folks who have never done it before.
Hades 2 revealed its gods and, oh no, they’re hot. Famous for its just stupidly attractive ensemble of Greek mythic figures, the sequel to Hades is coming to early access soon. I liked Nicole Carpenter’s writeup for Polygon about daddy Hephaestus.
sigh Costco. I hate Costco, in principle. But I did get to go last week and… well, it made me feel like the worst version of myself, but it is The Most Grocery Store imaginable. It would be an insult to the mission of Supernormal not to acknowledge that I almost bought a 20 pound bag of rice for my tiny kitchen (and did buy a box of like 30 waffles).
That’s… kind of it. I have the Elden Ring brain worms still and will probably never do anything else every again.
Anyway, thanks for reading!
DR