40
The film doesn't develop its one good idea so much as stumble around in the dark with it for 85 minutes, crashing noisily into the furniture.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
70
Village Voice by Alan Scherstuhl
As in so many Hollywood spectacles, the message and medium are at hopeless odds... Still, the set-up is arresting, the domestic scenes well observed and acted, and the payoffs involving that Roomba toy excellent. Also, a late-film twist isn't a surprise, exactly, but it is delicious.
83
The Purge manages to be smart, scary, and subversive.
40
The filmmakers are too much in love with their made-up holiday to observe it to the fullest.
50
The film’s thudding shocks and predictability dull its edge.
60
James DeMonaco’s blood-splattered thriller begins well before expiring slowly from multiple improbabilities.
50
The Hollywood Reporter by Neil Young
What should be a clammy exercise in claustrophobic, queasy tension becomes, in the hands of writer/director James DeMonaco, an underpowered compendium of over-familiar scare tactics and sledgehammer-subtle social satire.
40
Time Out London by Nigel Floyd
The film's would-be subversive ideas about the kneejerk appeal of social violence get lost in the mix.
40
This movie starts from a premise so sociologically batty it’s hard to take any of its subsequent terrors seriously, which means tension doesn’t so much fly out the window as fail to even get up the driveway.