Metacritic reviews

The Purge manages to be smart, scary, and subversive.

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.

There’s gold in the premise of “The Purge” and its dismissal of subtlety. But like the residents of its world, when given the opportunity, it drops restraint and goes for blood.

James DeMonaco’s blood-splattered thriller begins well before expiring slowly from multiple improbabilities.

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.

The film’s thudding shocks and predictability dull its edge.

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.

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.

The film's would-be subversive ideas about the kneejerk appeal of social violence get lost in the mix.

The filmmakers are too much in love with their made-up holiday to observe it to the fullest.