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| Directed and Written by James DeMonaco |
Alo Party Peoples.
These movies have the best damn pitch behind them I've heard in years. It's the near-ish future, and the United States has been taken over by a vaguely defined political block called the New Founding Fathers, and their signature legislation is The Purge. For one night a year, all crime becomes legal; you can do anything you want, steal anything you want, kill anyone you want, and not only will you not be held accountable afterwards, there will be no emergency services or police to stop you in the act. While it's presented to the populace as a release valve for pent up dark desires to ensure a safe, stable society otherwise, it's heavily implied that the real purpose of the Purge is population control, i.e. encouraging the poor to slaughter each other to ease strain on the social safety net.
The Purge took that twisted, ripe for satire premise... and used it for little more than a slasher movie where they don't need a reason why nobody calls the cops. Fortunately, they stopped trying to be horror films after the first one. The Purge: Anarchy is a melodramatic bloodily blunt action movie with a message in the tradition of The Toxic Avenger or They Live that just happens to take place during the 2023 Purge, taking a walking tour through things that might happen on that night. And it asks the thuddingly obvious question "If the purpose of the Purge is to clear out inner city slums, wouldn't the government start doing some of it themselves?"
The Purge: Election Year follows up on that revelation with Elizabeth Mitchell as Sen. Charlie Roan, who went into politics after losing her family to the Purge fifteen years ago and is now running an independent campaign for President on a platform of abolishing it. By hammering on the point that the Purge encourages regular people to kill each-other to survive while the wealthy and powerful get rich off it, she's been leading the New Founding Fathers' candidate in the polls, so they respond by revoking the rules that protect government officials during the Purge and holing up in a bunker to wait out the night. Sen. Roan tries to do so as well, but the New Founding Fathers' have an inside man on her security force, meaning that she and Frank Grillo as the retired police sergeant from the last film have to flee through the streets of Washington DC and make contact with anti-Purge rebels to survive the night.
Much like the premise, the whole film is an excuse to engage in sin and debauchery with the semblance of a message, but I'll be damned if they don't do it well. It isn't the best execution of this premise, I still think that would be an anthology of stuff people might do on Purge Night, but they know how to have fun with the idea. It strikes me that, besides that cringe-worthy tagline of "Keep America Great", Election Year is surprisingly lacking in digs at this particular election year, but it's better off for it. It would have been easy to put one of the Purgers in a Trump hat or stick an old fraying Bernie bumper sticker on one of the victims' cars, but it would have dated the film almost immediately. Instead, it's willing to go a bit more general and focus on more of the little details of Purge Night. Besides resolving the previously unanswered question of why no one was using the Purge as an opportunity to off government officials they didn't like, we get details like foreigners coming to the United States on Purge Night to engage in "murder tourism". They feel that this may be their last chance to engage in this twisted American Dream, so they're going all out by doing it dressed up in caricatured Americana.
Having a point behind them doesn't turn The Purge series into The Big Short, though they're both just as cynical about most of the same stuff. They're cheesy, melodramatic action films, but they're a really good version thereof that's just a bit smarter than you'd expect such fare to be.
Have a nice day,
Greg.B
FINAL RATING: 3/5
