Most horror franchises get dumber with the sequels. The Purge is one of the few that got smarter. The first Purge movie (not to be confused with today's subject, The First Purge, which is actually the *fourth* Purge movie) had a ridiculous SciFi premise but only used it to justify why Ethan Hawke's family couldn't run away from their house or call the cops. That was, because of "The Purge", a wacky government plan to save society by making crime legal for one night. The sequel, The Purge: Anarchy took that premise and made it more interesting and more political, by giving us the perspective of regular people getting hunted by the rich. Then The Purge: Election Year all but begged its audience to vote Hillary Clinton. Which... oh well.
So The Purge movies were never masterpieces or very sophisticated. But they were ahead of the curve in some ways. They beat Jordan Peele to the punch by making mass-market social commentary horror. And as our society has collapsed over these four years, the high concept Purge idea seems all the more possible and less farfetched.
The First Purge (not to be confused with The Purge 1) is a prequel and shows how the whole Purge thing got started. It chooses to jump deep into ethnic tensions as its main focus, much more explicitly than the other movies. Our cast of heroes is almost entirely Black. The villains are almost entirely White, including several guys dressed in KKK hoods and one fellow in a smart Hugo Boss coat. If it were not currently 2020, I would call think this is all too obvious. I'd even wonder if maybe the scene of cops beating a Black man to death at the Staten Island Yankees stadium was too much... except... shit. In Trump's America, subtlety is out.
I don't think The First Purge is a great movie. It is not very well shot and really lacks particularly good acting. Marissa Tomei is in the movie off to the side somewhere and thoroughly wasted. Too many characters in the cast feel like they were written by somebody who just binged The Wire on HBO Max. The best villain is Skeletor (Rotimi Paul), a Black psycho, who is sadly given some tribal scarifications on his face. Let us just carefully walk around the unfortunate implications of that decision and move on.
But The First Purge does have some decent ideas. It reveals that the entire Purge premise was bullshit from the start. In fact, if you take away laws and cops, people will just party in the streets and have fun. Get me the ghost of Bakunin, he'll be excited to know that anarchism actually does work. The Not-Republican villains realize they need to bribe people to even starting shooting and when that doesn't work, they send in racist militias. The subtext allows the Purge movies to be more than Anti-Purge films. (The other movies were protesting an idea that doesn't exist, what's the point?) Now the series is more a broad metaphor of how crime is created by corrupt governments and how collective action by communities can fight back. That is my most positive read on the material.
My less positive read is that this movie is kinda cruddy and mediocre. It isn't scary. In 2018 I chose to see Sorry to Bother You instead of this. I made the right choice. The Purge: Anarchy is still the "good one" if only want to see one of these films.
The First Purge is probably is a better movie to watch than Antebellum, which I might have to see this month. I am not happy about that either.
Next time: Demons (1985)
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