With
The First Purge, we finally get to see how The Purge came to be. It starts as an experiment on Staten Island
when “The New Founding Fathers” legalize crime on the island for twelve
hours. A psychologist (Marisa Tomei)
designed the night to be a “cultural experiment”, but the new political party,
anxious to sway the experiment in their favor to further their agenda, send
government assassins into the streets to cause chaos.
As
I’ve watched these movies, I’ve always wondered what brought upon the Purge,
and in the end, it turns out it was some Tea Party bullshit.
The
conceit that poor and/or psychologically imbalanced people have been
financially compensated for their participation to ensure and/or incentivize
anarchy prevails feels like stacking the deck a bit. I did however like how some of the characters
considered to be “criminals” try to defend their neighborhood from the
hooligans committing “legal” crimes. This
sort of finely balanced nuance is eventually thrown out the window in favor of them
doing battle with killers wearing KKK garb and assassins in blackface masks,
which bluntly hammers home the point to the folks in the cheap seats.
What’s
interesting is that at first, no one in the neighborhood really purges. Instead, they hold massive block parties with
lots of booze and loud music. (Noise
violations be damned! This is Purge
night!) I also appreciated some of the
more random moments of WTF mayhem (like bag ladies rigging up exploding teddy
bears). It’s these little touches that
help make this entry the best in the series.
Unfortunately, by the third act, it just becomes an unending series of repetitive
action sequences. The action pales in
comparison to what we saw in The Purge: Anarchy
and suffer from some cheap-looking CGI bullet hits.
Like
Election Year, The First Purge works better when it sticks to surviving. The subplot of a young drug dealer trying to
outrun a demented, wild-eyed killer known as “Skeletor” (who turns a couple of
needles into a set of makeshift Wolverine claws) is more involving than anything
we’ve seen previously in the series. When it comes to the heavy-handed sermonizing though, it’s a little too
on-the-nose for me. (“They’re turning
our neighborhood into the Coliseum. Are
we going to be the Christians or the lions?”)
Are you craving more reviews of horror sequels? Well, you can read all about them in my latest book, The Bloody Book of Horror, which is currently on sale at Amazon. Get your copy HERE
I thought the action was pretty well done, personally with how insane politics are nowadays, I think films NEED to be on-the-nose in order to be effective at all, subtly just isn't going to cut it anymore these days.
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