I have several confessions to make, so I’ll just jump right in. I’m hooked on hot cocoa in a bad way. I’m usually so eager for my hot cocoa fix that I’m unable to wait for the milk to heat up, so I just pour it out into my chocolate-lined Aristocats mug on the first sign of steam. Since it’s only lukewarm, I can down the whole thing quicker than the Fox without fear of burning the roof of my mouth. Of course, this leaves my palate unfulfilled, so I head back to the electric range and steam up another batch.

On the night of May 25, 2013, years of chocolate-induced sugar highs finally came home to roost. It was already a Saturday, which is always bad news for me. Michael Jordan announced, on a dark Saturday in 1995, that he was abandoning his true passion of baseball to return to his second love of basketball. If Michael Jordan didn’t have the courage to pursue his dreams, what chance did I have? Since then, that awful day of the week has served as a constant reminder of the emptiness of life, and thus my weekends haven’t gotten off to a good start since.

So I was doing my usual Saturday night routine of watching several DVR’d episodes of Hannity, while during the commercial breaks I would crank up The Rush Limbaugh Show and reanimate my milk with a few more squirts of Bosco. So I thought it would be just another uneventful evening… Hannity tossed the football, and I pretended to catch it. The credits rolled, followed by a few ads. The final ad to play was the trailer for The Purge. However, the DVR cut out after the first ten seconds. I never saw Ethan’s handsome mug, which of course would have calmed me down, as it would anyone. So, I’m already high on cocoa and got Hannity and Limbaugh encouraging me to take down the socialists inside the beltway. Add in the abridged Purge trailer, and I’m thinking it’s go-time for anarchy, screaming “Well Barack, you’ve finally done it now!”, as I rushed to my linen closet to retrieve my BB gun.

I’ll take the fifth on the specifics of what I did over the next twelve hours. Some details seem to have come to light in the media, with some asserting that I have committed “hate crimes”. I’ll put those allegations to rest right now. I committed no hate crimes, and am not a racist. Want proof? I voted for Romney in 2012, but only because I agreed with his policies more than Obama's. Check, mate.

So after serving my 500 hours of community service, I was finally able to get down to the theater and see the source of my current legal troubles. The Purge has a thought-provoking “what if” premise; if crime were made temporarily legal, how would civilized people behave? Apparently, nearly everyone uses their twelve hour annual purge window to just go nuts and descend into violent anarchy. I’ll leave aside the countless implausible aspects of this scenario. You can discuss the feasibility of such a society in your next book club meeting at the Coffee Bean. It’s a fictional movie, so the producers can come up with whatever crazy premise they desire.

Problems arise though when there are direct contradictions within said premise. In The Purge, it is explicitly asserted that between now and the year 2022, the American economy plunged into complete chaos, leading to rampant poverty and crime. The annual purge was enacted somewhere in that timeframe in order to alleviate those problems. In 2022, the problems of crime and poverty have both been solved, with both statistics at or near 0%. If this is the case, and everybody is now well-off, as we are told, why is there still a purge? Wouldn’t one purge have taken care of it? Also, I’ll repeat, the economy is booming, unemployment non-existent, and yet there are still apparently many homeless, impoverished people. Which is it?

The fact that the purge has been going on for a while also kills the mystery. We already know that things get really bad every purge, and people know to prepare. The first act records Ethan Hawke and his wife and two children as they return home from their daily outings to prime themselves for that night’s pending lockdown inside their mansion. This is no big deal to them, as Ethan made his fortune selling home security systems that turn one’s abode into a virtual fortress, so their house is finely equipped to deal with any potential intruders. The imminent purge, where people are indiscriminately murdered on every street corner, is treated so nonchalantly by Ethan Hawke and company that they almost forget to lock down the house before the 7 pm start time because they’re eating dinner.

There was a solution here to the inconsistent premise and lack of intrigue; the purge presented in the film should have been the first one, not the umpteenth. Then there would have been “justification” for having one, i.e. let the bad people go nuts to either “cleanse” themselves or wipe each other out, plus us viewers would have no idea what’s about to happen. Instead, we spend one the truly worst first acts in cinema history listening to horrible expository dialogue on the history of the purge. Ethan Hawke is so bad in the first thirty minutes that I thought he was doing a send-up of some long lost 1950’s sitcom, as the husband returning from a taxing yet jolly day at work to spend quality time wit da fam. That dinner scene deserves mention again because of how poorly conceived it is. You lose your credibility with the audience when this supposedly intelligent family nearly forgets the one thing they have to remember, once a year. I’ll repeat again for proper emphasis. The purge was about to start, and they almost forgot because they were eating string beans. Yes, we get the point that the purge is just “the way things are” now, but there’s no way it would be treated as such a non-event.

Of course, for this purge, things go horribly wrong for Hawke’s crew when a homeless man is allowed into their home by the son. That homeless man is being pursued by a crazed posse of twenty-something young professionals who seek the cleansing purge they are entitled to. This situation leads a few more pretty good script snafus. Firstly, the crazy posse decides to siege the home instead of just finding another homeless guy to execute; they didn’t have any particular beef with this dude. Secondly, the young posse cuts the power to the house, and the lights go out. Backup power kicks in, yet Hawke never turns the lights back on. Why? Well, I guess that’s because it would ruin the second half of the movie, where Hawke and the wife slowly walk in circles around the dark house for an hour, waiting for random startling events to occur.

The Purge attempts to make morality its central theme; Hawke must decide whether or not to give up the homeless man’s life in exchange for his family’s. Presumably, this is meant to expose the thin line separating those who purge and those who don’t. If even the well-off, supposedly good people can be driven to kill, then this would reveal our species’ true nature. However, forcing someone to make a Sophie’s choice isn’t about morality; it’s about practicality. So we’re meant to come down hard on Hawke for the tough decisions he’s inclined to make, but a man cannot be morally judged for choosing one of two mutually exclusive and suboptimal outcomes.

So there’s very little here worth seeing. The only effective aspect of the film is the juxtaposition of the purge backstory with the extreme violence on screen, which they don’t scrimp on. There’s the immediate stuff going on in the Hawke household, plus the feeds from CCTV cameras getting beamed across national TV, showing the worst of humanity. You get drawn into a world where the purge is very real, but the movie never permits you to delve into any of its subtler points. Any story from one of those brief black-and-white CCTV clips would have been much more intellectually engaging than Ethan Hawke giving us a dimly lit tour of his house while trying to feel out his character for 85 minutes.

Finally, I must warn fragile-minded folks out there that they may find the extreme violence and gore in The Purge very disturbing. But it shouldn’t be, as this is a work of fiction, through and through. As long as Joe Biden is standing guard our nation’s deputy commander, such a cataclysm could never happen in America.