What is a Purge movie to do in a post-Trump world? The answer, it seems, is Go Big Or Go Home. Whereas the 2013 original proffered a small-scale dystopian thriller with Ethan Hawke and a hook-y premise — a government-sanctioned national holiday where all crime becomes legal for 12 hours — the series (five films and a TV show) has built and built to its current incarnation, The Forever Purge, where looting and pillaging in fancy-dress masks becomes an everyday occurrence. If it’s a rare mainstream flick surfing the zeitgeist — it taps into some of the inchoate anger present in, say, the storming of the Capitol — the result is Satire 101 for dunces, lacking either a nuanced political viewpoint or the consistent yuks and thrills of great exploitation.
This time round, Everardo Valerio Gout’s film starts by splitting its focus on two disparate groups. The first is Mexican husband and wife Juan (Tenoch Huerta) and Adela (Ana de la Reguera) who, having burrowed under the wall, have been in America for ten months and are about to face their first Purge. Juan is a skilled cowboy for the Tucker family — patriarch Caleb (Will Patton), his distrustful-of-immigrants son Dylan (Josh Lucas), Dylan’s pregnant wife Cassie (Cassidy Freeman) and his sister Harper (Leven Rambin) — who are also settling down for the big night on their heavily fortified farm. The ‘holiday’ passes relatively uneventfully for both parties until a renegade right-wing group start to ignore the 12-hour rule and pursue an eternal reign of terror. After all, “purging is American”.
The series’ once effective imagery — fucked-up versions of American archetypes — now just feels tired.
Events conspire for the Mexicans and Americans to team up and head for sanctity in the oversized cab of a trailer-less rig. There are run-ins with bikers, a sortie into a deserted cinema (the film is full of jump scares as red herrings — not one of them comes off) and very handy help from an underground support network. At each plot turn, it’s hard to think of another film that uses TV news so heavily as Basil Exposition. A bigger problem is that the series’ once effective imagery — fucked-up versions of American archetypes — now just feels tired.
A twist in the second half has some wit, there’s one great unexpected kill and some of the action — a bit involving a sheep — works well. But there are clichés and bluntness strewn throughout James DeMonaco’s writing (“We’re in this together”; “I’m scared to have my baby in this world”), and the performances are a mixed bag; de la Reguera and Huerta have chemistry and smidgeons of gravitas, but the Americans, especially Josh Lucas’ one-note isolationalist, have a direct-to-DVD quality. As the film moves towards its climax, the script crowbars in a personal vendetta in a desperate attempt to raise the already high stakes, and winds up in a desultory showdown. If this proves to be the final Purge, despite upping the bangs, it ends the series on a whimper.