I've never seen the film The Purge but like everyone I know the basic plot and ideas behind it – crime is controlled throughout the year because, for some reason, it is totally legal on one night per year with no legal repercussions for anything you may do. The concept for this short film is a great one because it deals with that morning after feeling –awkwardness is bad enough if you only drunkenly tried to kiss a colleague the previous night, but how must it be if you actually broke in and murdered their entire family along with many other excessive acts. I read the summary for this and it sounded great but unfortunately it is not.
The first thing is that the short plays to the excess of the idea, not to the social awkwardness of it. This is a bad decision for the start because it takes away almost certainly the richest seam for comedy in the idea. On top of this the material isn't very good and it plays to excess and absurdity in a way that is brash and basic. The silly excess of it doesn't even go really far enough and by leaving it mostly driven by dialogue (apart from dumb random stuff at the end) it also highlights how much the dialogue falls short of what it needed to be. The performances match the delivery which is understandable since two of the three cast members are writers or directors of the material – but of course this means that the weakness of the approach feeds through.
A really nice idea when said out loud as a pitch-sentence, but the resulting short wastes all the potential, has no finesse and is generally poor.
