Dumb Things In The Purge Movies Everyone Just Ignored

Consider, if you will, mother nature and her sprawling variety of birds of prey, each specialized in a certain field to the point of near perfection. There's the Swainson's hawk, with its ability to pluck tiny insects out of the air. There's the red-tailed hawk, adaptable to almost any climate in the continental United States.

And then, there is the Ethan Hawke.

As presented in 2013's The Purge, this majestic creature is shown to be an expert in home defense. As a security salesman, he's made a comfortable living knowing his product inside and out. He understands his job so well that he knows exactly what to worry about when a bunch of prep school purgers show up at his door: a battering ram. Maybe a truck with some tow cables.

So what are people paying for?

What's the point of a security system that can be taken down by a Jeep with a winch on the one night of the year when everybody's mom has a Punisher battle van? Think about how often we see freakshow masochists driving souped-up deathmobiles in the rest of the movies. Doesn't it seem like being those-proof would be a pretty necessary selling point?

Look, there's no denying that everyone has a dark side they need to indulge from time to time. That's sort of the whole point of the Purge series if you turn a blind eye to the thematic equivalent of a series of neon billboards flashing the words "GENTRIFICATION ISN'T GREAT, YOU GUYS." It's not the fact that everyone gets stoked on domestic terrorism once a year that should bother you. It's that they all apparently decide to treat it like a shockingly well-funded community college burlesque show.

There are plenty of examples throughout the films, but let's focus in on the precedent-setting offenders in the first instalment. They dress like a group of private school super-seniors at an age-play convention. Two of them spend most of their evening skipping in circles with machetes, which seems like a wildly inappropriate expenditure of time for psychopaths on the one night of the year when they can really let their hair down. The only member of the gang that uses harsh language to facilitate a hasty exchange with the protagonists gets shot in the head for his trouble, all so the ringleader can keep monologuing like he's in a Joss Whedon-directed production of King Lear.

And they're the tip of the iceberg. The sequels are soppy with weirdos in weirdo masks speaking in verse while they weedwhack their neighbors to death. Basically, the question you have to ask yourself is, how many just-below-the-surface maniacs took high school theater classes, and how are they the alpha dogs in this scenario?  

If you're fortunate enough to have spent any time with your grandparents, you've no doubt heard them lamenting the state of current affairs. For millennials, it was the unforgivable sin of young people wearing their baseball caps the wrong way around. For our grandkids, it'll be when we complain that nobody bothers to post photos of their brunch anymore once augmented reality Instahologram takes over. It's natural. Habits are hard to break, and nobody has an easy time seeing the traditions they grew up with relegated to the past.

That's what makes it so unsettling when we see people like the old lady in The Purge: Anarchy gleefully auctioning off the opportunity to hunt the most dangerous game in a high-stakes laser tag arena. It's not the violence and inhumanity; if you've made it a movie and a half into the franchise, you're already getting numb to that. It's that Grandma adjusted so quickly to the idea that our new national holiday was a Slaughterpalooza.

Yes, part of the point of these movies is that everyone has, as Grover so wisely put it, a monster in their mirror. It just seems like 60 or so years of adapting to the idea that murder is wrong would've made it more difficult to get stoked on National Stab Day.

The Purge: Anarchy tells us that the real point of the Purge was never to give potential serial killers a day on. The actual purpose is to give Ayn Rand enthusiasts a series of life-changing nighttime emissions by killing off people dependent on government assistance. We're told that this has salved an otherwise untreatable economic crisis. Yay liberty.

Okay, ready for a fun but relevant lesson on the economic effects of removing that much spending from the economy and killing off everyone willing to work a service industry job?

Fewer people spending money doesn't create a better economy. Fewer people working the crappy jobs doesn't, either. Much to the dismay of any Thanoses in the audience, fewer people in general is a bad thing. Populations tend to adapt to growing demands. They tend to collapse when everyone working to meet demands gets a piano dropped on them because it's March 21.

It's right there in the televised alert: "Police, fire, and emergency medical services will be unavailable until tomorrow morning." Yes, that's a buzzkill bordering on being discriminatory toward people whose purge dream is to prank call 911 without fear of retribution. That isn't what's incongruous.

What's incongruous is that with all of these services shut down, the government is still sending out body collection teams. Loud ones, with megaphones. Putting aside the logistics of telling a group of what are essentially CDC garbage men to hit the streets on Everyone's A Batman Villain Night, it's hard to imagine what the point is in the first place.

"Alright, we've given the general public access to machine guns, flamethrowers, and Jigsaw-adjacent death traps. For twelve hours, everyone gets to maim and kill to their heart's content in the streets of every city in America. Our country will run red with blood. Any questions?"

"Yeah, what if it gets yucky?"

"Good point. Can't have that."

Filled to brimming though the Purge movies are with colorful sociopaths, The First Purge probably takes the cake. It introduces us to Skeletor, a man so crazy he's not even scared of being sued by the He-Man legal team. He's unstable. He's unpredictable. He is, as the song goes, altogether ooky. He's Victor Zsasz on NoDoz. The lad's a menace.

And it is bonkers that he's not already in jail.

As backward as the New Founding Fathers' society might be, it's difficult to imagine any nation so dystopian that they wouldn't arrest this guy. He acts like a background character on one of the antagonist ships from Pirates of the Caribbean that got fired for trying too hard. He carries a razor blade in his mouth, which seems like a problem that should've self-corrected a while back considering how wacky his facial expressions get.

But hey, being a weirdo isn't a crime. You know what just might be, though? Smoking crack, which is something that he openly admits to while talking to a government official during the first three minutes of the film. This is not a man possessed of a working survival instinct. This is a human cry for attention. And when he's crying "I love doing drugs" in front of a cop, he probably shouldn't be on the street.

So you're a Staten Island party animal, deep into whatever the kids like these days. Trap music, maybe, or dubstep, or Alan Alda. Whatever youth culture is about. Glow sticks for sure. Glow sticks are evergreen.

You and your party friends turn your eight-track music down long enough to hear that there's a Purge a'comin, and it's a'comin on strong. The streets will be filled with the disenfranchised and the furious, eager to take their frustration out on the general populace without fear of recourse. Not only will they be allowed to kill, they'll be incentivized. Cash will be paid to anyone with the brass stones to start manning up and gunning down. There's an open bounty on anyone alive. How do you respond?

Apparently by throwing a wicked rave in the middle of the road. It's like if the kids at Camp Crystal Lake showed up wearing Jacobian ruffs to accentuate which part of their necks Jason should aim for.