Tag: The Purge

The Purge franchise is a weird one. It was extremely unique in concept and it had the ability to go in so many ways. The Purge received mix reviews and I enjoyed the crap out of it. The Purge: Anarchy received slightly better mixed reviews and I enjoyed the crap out of it.

But I know there is a lot of potential in this as a franchise. Especially if they don’t try to tell a single story over and over again in different films. Give me different characters, different unique settings, and see how this shit went down. Maybe, just maybe, eventually give me that prequel film I know you are just dying to get out. But only one damn it.

The Purge: Election Year apparently wants to try and end it. They say this could be the final purge night due to (plot) reasons which will be noted below. But if anyone imagines this is actually the final Purge movie, they are probably delirious.

Oh well, I just hope they are more subtle about certain aspects than with Anarchy, where they literally had a no-name government character explain it all in the last five minutes of the film.

This one technically spells out the Purge for us as well.

Alright, I had to do a bit of math because they didn’t want to give me the year, but I think this is set in the year 2035. That is a really long time from now. The first Purge was in 2021 and Anarchy was 2022, so recurring characters are 13 years older and the Purge itself has been happening for 18 years. So alright, HUGE jump into the future, a lot of things happened I guess.

This is about Senator Roan (Elizabeth Mitchell), someone who has dedicated the last 18 years of her life to politics and ending The Purge for good. Why? Well, during the first purge (I assume, or else this takes place even more in the future), he family was tied up, tortured, and she was the only one left alive thanks to a sadistic game. Oh okay yeah, that seems like a good reason to hate it. She is an independent Senator, but people love her, and damn it, she is now running for president. She would be the first President that isn’t a member of the New Founding Fathers party since The Purge started.

She is running against a guy (Kyle Secor) who also is an actual Minister, for not so on the nose comparisons. Her head of security though is Leo (Frank Grillo), from that last movie! I mean, sure, this means that it is literally like a decade later or something, but whatever, he is still pretty good at thinking on his feet and killing bad dudes. But security isn’t too bad, what with the low crime rates and all.

Oh shit, guess what! There is a Purge in March, like normal! And the New Founding Fathers have heard the concerns of the citizens and decided to lift the clause saying that government officials Class 10 and Higher are no longer immune to the Purge. Timing is everything of course, because they want to totally just kill Roan and make the election an easy one. Roan of course refuses to go to an underground bunker and instead deck out her house like a normal American.

Oh and there is another plot. Joe (Mykelti Williamson) runs a grocery store and his Purge insurance premium went up thousands of dollars the day before the Purge. So now he can’t just let his store get robbed and get it paid for. He is going to wait up on the roof, joined by his business partner Marcos (Joseph Julian Soria). There is also a girl (Betty Gabriel) who rides around in a specialized ambulance to help out despite no protection. And a girl (Brittany Mirabile) who really wants a candy bar. And Edwin Hodge returns again, this time as the leader of the main resistance movement!

No one has been this obsessed over candy bars since Bill Murray in Little Shop of Horrors.

The Purge: Election Year is arguably the weakest film in the series, despite what people say about the first film. Horror is only sort of an element here, it is replaced even more with just bloody gun fights and action sequences. The horror scares that exist aren’t so much the depravity of human beings, but more just people jumping out of the dark.

I will say that this film does the best “world building” of any in the series. They had smaller elements in Anarchy, but on almost every street we saw glimpses of people purging in grotesque and eerie ways. It added unique moments to the franchise. On the other hand, all of the creepy and disturbing moments that are advertised in the trailers and posters are mainly bit parts in the actual movie. The people dressed like Washington, Lincoln, Liberty? That scene was maybe 2-3 minutes only. No, the real bad guys just came from an actual group of soldier like people just trying to get the Senator.

This film is also anything but subtle. Obviously they haven’t been doing a good job at it before, but it really doesn’t give a fuck this time around. We even get a board room scene of politicians trying to figure out how they will get back at the senator.

Here is a list of random weird things in the film: Election Day is apparently in May now, they show the results and call it somehow early in the morning when people just start voting, the movie seemingly glorifies gun violence while shaming the purge at the same time, an annoying amount of misplaced morality in the final act of the film.

But also, what the hell is this movie being set more than decade after Anarchy? What do they have to gain by forcing this story so much forward? I can only assume future Purge films are going to be awkward filler telling non related stories (which again, I am fine with), or even worse, tell us about a post-Purge America and just make this a slightly scary regular action flick. No idea their end game, but clearly they don’t either.

Election Year introduces some nice concepts. Like foreigners traveling to America just to kill and leave. And random acts of Purging. But it loses a lot of the horror touch and doesn’t know how to be subtle if their life depended on it. The movie is still an okay adventure for maybe a single viewing, but harping on morality without giving good reasons for it just kind of piss me off.

2 out of 4.

In the summer of 2013, there was a horror movie that ended up being surprisingly good. No, not The Conjuring. That was expected to be good and delivered.

I am talking about The Purge, which created its own unique concept for a movie and ran with it. What we got was a house survival type film, with some tense moments and a lot of twists. But more importantly, it created a world with a lot of potential. The Purge was just one families story, but they could set it in any number of settings, with any number of character types, and get completely different films and experiences out of it.

The possibilities are endless. Which is why I was excited to see The Purge: Anarchy, which is set in a city, and looks like it will feature a few different story lines that may intersect. A nice way to do it. Unless this one bombs, I hope they set one in a rural community next. A 500 person city or something. Maybe an island. Or a college campus. Classic settings for horror movies, but these ones have the twist that they involve “normal people” committing the crimes. Or whatever they want to do, as long as it makes me uncomfortable to watch.

Jimmies are definitely getting rustled here.

Set a year after the first film, The Purge: Anarchy gives us a few different groups of people with different reasons for being outside. Like Leo (Frank Grillo) who has a decked out armor car and intentionally went out into the city for some Purge action. He has his reasons. He wants revenge.

Or let’s take Eva (Carmen Ejogo) and her daughter Cali (Zoe Soul). They definitely don’t want to be outside. But thanks to some soldiers invading their complex, taking people into the streets to be prisoners, they really don’t have a choice.

Or even the young couple Liz (Kiele Sanchez) and Shane (Zach Gilford). They had plenty of time to get home, even took the back roads to avoid the busy highways. But when a group of mask men tampered with their vehicle intentionally to leave them stuck in the city, well, they have to learn to flee or fight back as well.

All three groups meet up rather quickly in the film, allowing them safety in numbers to try and survive the twelve hours. Also featuring Michael K. Williams as a resistance leader, trying to get the poor to seize the moment and topple the rich and elite, who he claims use the Purge to secure their own positions in life.

These are the real consequences of P. Diddy‘s Vote or Die campaign.

Not only were my jimmies rustled from the early on pictures, but they literally were rustled almost the entire length of the movie. Let’s say five minutes in or so until the credits rolled. This isn’t disgusting like The Human Centipede is disgusting. It is disgusting on a more primal level, given that these are just regular average people of various ethnicities and backgrounds. That is what really makes these movies. If you don’t accept the movies premise on the basic level, you won’t be able to get into the atmosphere it creates and you probably won’t enjoy it.

I thought the movie was extremely tense. Despite common thought, having guns as a main killing weapon doesn’t turn a horror into an action.

The acting of course isn’t something to be admired. No Oscars will be won by any of it, of course.

Overall, I enjoyed the movie. Obviously. They are setting up bigger and crazier events in the future, pretty nicely. This franchise can have a lot of life left in it. But if you hated the first one, no way you’d enjoy this one.

3 out of 4.

Originally, I felt that the ad campaign for The Purge came a bit later than most movies. I didn’t hear about it or see the trailer until Evil Dead, which was in March!

But they really ramped up the ad campaign in the last few weeks, almost to annoyance. Needless to say (because I am a coward), the trailer frightened me, and gave me great hope that this movie would provide scares along with philosophical debates about ethics, morals, and the human spirit.

The year is 2022 and America is a peaceful country! Unemployment is less than 1%, and there is basically no crime. Why? Because we have changed the way America works! Every year, for 12 hours, everything is legal in the United States. Murder, theft, you name it. No police or firefighters will be on duty, everything is fair game. It lets people vent out their frustrations, and become wild animals if they so choose.

A lot of rich people choose to stay inside with fancy security systems. Like James Sandin (Ethan Hawke), a fancy security systems salesman. He has the fanciest securest house on the block, because of his profitable year, so his wife (Lena Headey) and two kids (Max Burkholder, Adelaide Kane) are set!

But once The Purge begins, the son sees a homeless man (Edwin Hodge) running down the street. He noobs it up, opens the door, and lets the homeless man in. This opens an unfortunate can of worms when an unruly mob of masked college students clamor outside of their villa, wanting to get their purge on. The polite leader (Rhys Wakefield) gives them the chance to turn the homeless man in, and they won’t attack the family. But if they wait too long, they will tear down their walls and kill everyone inside. Oh snap.

Looks like we have quite an ethical conundrum on our hands. Can they willingly send out a homeless man to his death? Can James willingly let a man die, if the life of his family is potentially on the line?

I mean, he looks trustworthy, that polite leader. The first thing I noticed about The Purge is that it is almost painfully short. 85 minutes in length! That is usually a warning sign. That means the plot doesn’t last long enough to fill a full movie. Or they realize the idea gets old really quick.

But the length was really appropriate for the plot, and I never felt like it dragged too much. There was some long scenes that were just heavy in suspense, but when you are wandering around your house in the dark, looking for strangers, you aren’t just going to run around every corner.

It was somewhat predictable, with the plotlines, yet equally surprising. I loved watching Ethan Hawke go on a kill streak to save his house. I would have stood up and cheered, if I didn’t respect normal movie watching practices.

It could have delved more into the ethical nature of the entire Purge, but I liked that it used subtle features to tell us the backgrounds of various characters, without outright saying them to our face. I do think they harped on the idea of murder too much, when other laws, like downloading music and stealing a car are just as legal. Time to get the misses some new bling, I say.

The movie is full of jump scares with only a few scenes that made me leave my seat, but I think it still is an interesting addition to the horror genre.

3 out of 4.