The Purge

The idea behind "The Purge" is one of those ideas that sounds perfect for about three seconds before you start actually thinking about how it would work: in America, for one night a year, nothing is illegal (the tagline is "one night a year all crime is legal" but that's like saying "one night a year all water is dry" if you're going to split hairs and I am ALWAYS going to split hairs). In the world of The Purge, this annual twelve hours of mass catharsis is enough to make the rest of the year peaceful and crime free. Because if there's one thing we know about criminals, it's that after one big crime they are typically all crimed-out and won't really be up for another crime for another year or so. Unemployment is at 1% which also makes sense because the reason the unemployment rate is so high today is because criminals are too busy obtaining money illegally just for the hell of it. 

The airtight logic continues: the main characters are a rich family in an idyllic suburban neighborhood who, because their lives are already perfect, have no interest in taking advantage in a nation-wide crime-spree. Instead, they put their house on high-security lockdown transforming it into one giant panic room where they go about their business and wait for the morning when they'll wake up and every city in America will NOT be burned to the ground, but rather everything will be back to normal. They'll simply clean the legal graffiti of their house, mow their legally peed on lawn, and move on. But no. Everything goes amiss when their son, refusing to accept his parents callous 1 percent-iness, sees a man in the street screaming for help and let's him in. Some terrifying masked killers (who, remember, are just normal law-abiding citizens ANY OTHER DAY) arrive at the house and explain that if they don't let them kill this man, they'll kill everyone. Because they can. 

It feels like a spoiler to say that they get in to the house at all, but the trailer makes it clear that they do. At which point I don't see what distinguishes The Purge from any other home invasion thriller. Once the masked (why are they masked?!) killers are in the house, what does it add that what they're doing is legal? They're psychopaths, and the homeowners are defending themselves against murderers who broke into their house - that's legal 365 days a year. 

Wild improbability aside, it raises a compelling question. How many crimes are committed simply because they are illegal? How many crimes are NOT committed because they are illegal? Doesn't everyone have something they'd do if there were no possible legal consequences? Still, just like with everything, there are certain individuals bound to spoil the fun for the rest of us. For instance, driving around in a stolen convertible throwing molotov cocktails at office buildings sounds great, but wouldn't one's enjoyment be hindered by the knowledge that any average joe on the street can just up and murder them? I'd probably stay home too.