Saw the horror flick The Purge and see it if you want some heavy-handed messages inexpertly tacked onto an interesting-but-poorly-executed premise full of dull and dreary … scares? I guess.

Premise is that in 2022, the economy is booming, unemployment is at 1% and there’s virtually no crime except on one night of the year when everything is legal… the moralizing is that this only makes the poor the victims because the rich can protect themselves from the marauding thrill-killers and that’s a fine message if you use it like a scalpel and not a broadsword.

But that’s only a tiny percent of the crime – mainly the movie is boring. The kind of movie that I rewrote in my head, preferring to imagine a good version of the story that I could concoct but a bunch of film makers could not (or would not). Major problem – this is only 9 years in the future and for this world to be created, things have to get a lot lot lot worse really fast in order to turn everything around and have the Purge have been happening long enough to seem semi-normal. They did not think this through… or they didn’t care.

Score: 62