‘The Purge’ too preposterous to hit hard, but mercifully brief
If Ray Bradbury was alive now and willing to half-ass the execution of a fairly novel concept, he might’ve written The Purge. Here is a movie with an easy-to-parse core that makes less sense with each passing second, if only because the world of the film, on a grand scale, does not exist. The question at the center of The Purge is morbidly fascinating—what if crime was legal across the United States for one 12-hour period every year?—but at least in this vision, it chooses to sidestep logic and world-building, and buckles under the weight of such slight storytelling.