On Friday (June 7), The Purge will hit cinemas and let audiences experience 90 minutes of a utopian world where, one night a year, the emergency services are suspended and chaos rules supreme. Whilst this sounds like a promising prospect - not in reality, but to watch - critics have warned that the film is not as worthwhile as it seems at first glance, and in film where the idea that a utopia can become just the opposite in a few short hours is proposed, it is never portrayed sufficiently.

Watch the Trailer for The Purge

Staring Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey and written/directed by James DeMonaco (Assault on Precinct 13), the film is set in a time when unemployment is at 1% and crime rates are the lowest they've ever been in the US, yet people are locking up their doors and boarding the window as the annual 'Purge' is about to occur; a 12-hour period when all crime is legal and society turns it's back on law and order. During this particular 'Purge,' Hawke and Headey's house is visited by a stranger who seeks sanctity, which is reluctantly given, only for a group of armed hoodlums to come to the house with a proposition that will test their morals; give them the guest and they'll leave.

Rather than being an interesting and terrifying watch though, the low budget film is "just a product of uninspired filmmaking," Simon Abrams from the Chicago Sun-Times wrote. Whilst Rick Groen of the Globe and Mail said that much of the action and manoeuvrability of the script "seems a bit tepid and, dare I say, staged." "A nutty if bloody lark, with a strange artificiality to the behaviors it portrays," was how Michael O'Sullivan of the Washington Post described it, with The New York Post's Manohla Dargis commenting "The message just gets louder and louder, cruder and cruder, which is too bad because Mr. DeMonaco knows how to set a stage."

Some critics were less bothered by the film's lack of subtly and others said it made them jump from time to time and still, it should do better that Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson's The Internship when the two go battle it out at the box office over the weekend, probably coming in second, behind Fast & Furious 6 obviously. If you still want to go see it, The Purge comes out today (June 7) in the US.

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