An average movie

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since this prequel was available on Netflix, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, even though this new installment doesn’t seem to have a great reputation, to be honest, I don’t think it was bad at all actually. Basically, one thing that always bothered me with this franchise was that the concept didn’t really make much sense to me. Indeed, why would the violence stop if you would allow people to do whatever they want for 12 hours? However, the context around the purge was much more developed than in the previous movies (especially with the very first movie which was so frustrating in that regard) so this movie was the one that made the most sense to me which resulted in a more rewarding viewing experience. Basically, they finally displayed that, outside the purge, there is still actually some criminality, even if the purge supposedly helped drastically dropped the criminality (after watching this movie, it is really doubtful though). Then, they also displayed that the whole concept is actually bogus since white militias were dropped to wipe out some whole black neighborhoods. Finally, I always had some doubts about the psychological ‘merits’ of the purge and, with this movie, it became obvious that it was above all a political tool after all. So, I actually liked the approach they took for this prequel but, unfortunately, pretty much nothing else did work in this movie though. Sure, it is always nice to see Marisa Tomei but there is not much she could do with such a half-baked character. The rest of the cast was even worse though as they all gave such weak performances but, on the other hand, they were not helped by the fact that all their characters were really poorly developed and not interesting whatsoever. The action scenes were also all rather underwhelming. Anyway, to conclude, I might be too generous with my rating here but I think it is worth a look but probably only if you really like the genre.  

6/10