Reviews of The Purge (2013) and related work
- Prequel: The First Purge (2018)
The Purge (2013
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Seen in 2017.
Nobody on this production seems to have taken the premise seriously. It doesn’t deserve serious treatment, but still, you don’t get a good movie this way.
‣ The First Purge (2018)
Seen in 2020.
In a near-future economic recession following that of 2008, a third party rises to power in the USA. The new government arranges to have international mercenaries enter a ghetto and carry out an ethnic cleansing in Klan hoods, Templar flags and blackface. The greatest hero of the night is the local drug lord. He’s both handsome and violent. The government pretends that it’s all an experiment to test the concept of lawless catharsis as a cure for societal ills.
I was hoping for Candyman (1992) meets Django Unchained (2012) but I got an edgy action flick like Escape from New York (1981) without the imagination, the characters, or the fun kitsch. The action sequences are uniformly cheap and boring. As in Escape, US authorities willingly take an economic hit for no good reason.
The movie was marketed with the image of a red baseball cap bearing the title, alluding to a popular emblem of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for the presidency. That’s economically efficient marketing, but it isn’t based directly on the script. It’s true that the script is a fantasy of violent popular resistance to a caricature of Trump’s Republican leadership, but the cowardly writers explicitly state that in the fiction, it’s not Trump or the Republicans doing the silly evil stuff. They posit that a third party would be needed to act on racism and classism in a depression, when in reality, a third party like the GPUS would do much to take the worst tendencies out of the US political system. The writers should not have picked the unwieldy name “New Founding Fathers of America” or put it on all the tat, as if the party and not the government ran the whole show.
If a tyrannical nativist leadership of the USA wanted ethnic cleansing so badly that it was prepared to murder even pliable pinkish-beige academics who supported the ruse of catharsis, there would have been cheaper ways to do it, including the concentration camps for Japanese-Americans that existed in WW2 and the concentration camps for American refugees that existed under Trump. Simply turning these into death camps and then denying it happened would have been far more economic than an annual day of lawlessness with drone strikes in public places. The script, of course, never brings up alternatives. The writers were, or pretended to be, disinterested both in the real world and in the world of their own fiction.
Alas, positing that racists are too stupid to use concentration camps serves no purpose other than spectacle. Here, the spectacle is of gun-toting charismatic citizens ranging from a community-organizing heroine to her ex-boyfriend heroin hero—a revoltingly romanticized version of a horrible human being—killing a stylish hybrid of Charlottesville neo-Nazis and the nebulous Russian-y foreigners associated with getting Trump elected. There’s also bad jump scares. The aim of this spectacle could actually be some kind of 2016 election catharsis, like Django Unchained’s contemporary blaxploitation, but in the same way that President Bracken doesn’t believe in the experiment, the writers didn’t believe in their own work except as an economic speculation.