Broken Base: Very unusual that it applied to the FIRST entry in a series, but some viewers hated this film for not exploring its premise, while others think it did what it could with the budget it had during production and was fine leaving room for the sequels to expand upon that.
Captain Obvious Aesop: Something like the Purge in real life would be a bad thing. Uh, thanks for that.
Critic-Proof: Critics lambasted the film for being a Cliché Storm filled with cheap scares and social commentary that is never fully developed. It still opened at #1 and recouped its cheap budget many times over.
Ensemble Dark Horse: The homeless dude earns a lot of points by saving the family from the deranged neighbors. Many people wanted the surviving Sandins to let him stay in their house.
Harsher in Hindsight: When initially and desperately holding their daughter at gunpoint, the Stranger tells the Sandins that he doesn't want to die, then comes one of the sequels The Purge: Election Year, where at the end the Stranger would commit a Heroic Sacrifice.
Charlie letting the stranger inside the house could be counted as one. While coming off as a Creepy Child, the fact of the matter is he saw someone afraid and in need of help and reached out to them.
Minor example. In the end of the film after The Purge has finished, Mary asked the homeless man if he will be okay. The man nods, Mary thanks him, and the man leaves the Sandin house.
Considering the man has saved Mary and her children's lives in the nick of time, it is understandable. Also, the man more or less considers the family as his savior, for not only allowing him to hide in the house (well, at least Charlie shows him his secret hideout at one point) but also Zoey killing the gang's leader who tried to kill the homeless man.
The film's blanket answer to any of the logic holes in its premise: "The Purge just works." Then comes the sequel, where it's revealed the Purge doesn't work.
There are those who argued that if there was a Purge in real life, most people would just commit petty crimes like smoking marijuana, looting grocery stores, and running unlicensed lemonade stands.
There's something darkly amusing about how Zoe walks downstairs just in time to see her boyfriend start shooting at her dad, her mom and her little brother, and when he gets his crazy ass shot instead she's way more concerned about the attempted murderer than the rest of her family. Girl, those are some hilariously awfulSkewed Priorities.
EVERY moment "Polite Stranger" appears, from his cheesy gleeful grinning every time he makes a threat to the Sandins to him kissing James's forehead after stabbing him. This "trying-way-too-hard-to-be-scary" attitude, depending on how seriously you're taking the movie, can either be annoying or hilarious and endearing.
The sheer number of times a villain is killed by someone showing up behind them and pumping them full of lead just as they're about to kill one of the family members.
The amount of times one of the Sandins runs off to another part of the house, causing the remaining family members to split up again to find them.
One of the deranged, murderous neighbors (Grace) makes a pathetic last ditch effort to kill the family in the Purge's final seconds, which promptly gets her ass beat down by the family's matriarch (Mary is so done with everything Purge-related at this point). It seriously makes you wonder just why they want to kill them so much.
Paranoia Fuel: If there is one thing to take away from the film, it's the idea that your neighbors, who seem all friendly and smiles, will likely try to shoot you if the opportunity presented itself for the most petty of reasons. This basically indicates virtually no one is safe in this society once Purge Night commences as people can and will act on their primal instincts if given the chance and trust is a very rare thing.
The Scrappy: Charlie and Zoe, both for defining the term Too Dumb to Live. Every action they take makes things worse and in Charlie's case, it gets his father killed.
Spiritual Adaptation: The franchise can be taken as this for the Rockstar game, Manhunt, as both are about people fighting for their lives in settings where crime is ignored against factions of masked killers.
The general consensus is that an intriguing concept (all crime is legal for twelve hours as a way to create social order) is barely explored, and the plot is a basic Home Invasion thriller with The Purge being just a contextual excuse as to why the family can't call the cops. You get some glimpses into the Purge at large through very brief news reports. For example, as many as 200 people are reported to have engaged in a mass free-for-all purging in their town centre.
This led to a huge Retool for the franchise starting with the second film, due to fan complaints about how the first film was way too small scale and basically a generic home invasion film with the "Crime is Legal for 12 Hours" angle slapped onto it as an afterthought. Every film since Purge: Anarchy is set in a major city, with full detail shown towards citizens in the background doing all sorts of violent and depraved things, and deconstructing the entire premise of why legalizing crime for one night doesn't work and how it's a cover for eugenic-style mass murder of the poor.
The Sandins as a whole, given how CinemaSins points out that the first good thing they do halfway through the movie feels completely unearned, but with special attention given to the kids Charlie and Zoey.
We're supposed to sympathize with Charlie for wanting to save an innocent homeless man, but his "selfless" actions go waaaaayyyy beyond just being a nice kid, to the point where he seems to care about saving a stranger more than his own family at times. He seems more like a selfish little asshole more concerned with staying on his moral high horse then keeping his family alive.
Zoey is supposed to be a little dumb but she's also still supposed to be one of the protagonists. Then she goes sides with and cares more about saving her boyfriend after he just tried to murder her father than checking on her own family and making sure they're alright. Worse yet, she continues to run off and hide in a petulant fit because Henry dies despite the fact she's in real danger from the group trying to get into the house.
The gang is wearing masks that resemble human faces, but the masks invoke a feeling of wrongness to them. The poster itself presents what looks like a horrifying Slasher Smile.
Outside of the masks, the one neighbor who looks to have a botox-paralyzed face is pretty inhuman-looking on her own.
