Few of this decade’s horror movie premises have been as deliciously enticing as The Purge’s. This idea of a society in which crime is legalized by the federal government for one night a year almost immediately earned lots of mainstream attention and sparked a ton of discussion starting with the franchise’s debut back in 2013. Yet while the films themselves have had their flashes of brilliance, each has fallen short of being a true classic and living up to the enormous potential. So why is that? What is it that’s preventing this series from fully delivering in every way we’d want it to? And where can it go from here? To figure that out, let’s revisit the first three installments and examine where exactly they went wrong.
When the first Purge hit theaters, the most widespread complaint was that it didn’t thoroughly explore its juicy premise. Indeed, the dystopia dreamed up by writer and director James DeMonaco ends up having surprisingly little impact on the actual plot; almost everything that happens could have occurred in a regular home invasion movie. There isn’t necessarily anything inherently wrong with that, though. Telling a small story while giving us glimpses of a larger world can be an effective use of a shoestring budget.
But there are a few problems with the execution. The first has been discussed to death, but it bears repeating: the characters behave in incredibly illogical ways, far more so than we can excuse in a movie like this. The most baffling example is that for an entire stretch of the film, the whole family makes little attempt to stay together despite the fact that there are armed madmen threatening to break into their home and a stranger with a gun is running loose. Even if you’re not the type of person to over-analyze movies and complain about plot contrivances, you will definitely find yourself shaking your head a few times during The Purge.
Additionally, the concept of presenting the family with a dilemma over whether to turn over an innocent man in order to spare themselves could make for some gripping drama, but it’s too rushed to leave any impact. So much time is wasted on other things, including a pointless subplot involving Zoey’s boyfriend, not to mention all the scenes of the characters just stumbling around in the dark. Eventually, Mary begs James not to send this stranger out to his death, and he almost instantly has a change of heart. It’s as if DeMonaco got bored of his own movie’s most intriguing question. Why even introduce an idea like this if so little is going to be done with it? This won’t be the last time we ask ourselves that question during the series.
Part of what’s initially so compelling about the premise of The Purge is the suggestion that those around you may secretly be harboring psychopathic urges, and one night a year, they will unleash their true selves to violent ends. DeMonaco takes advantage of this with a third-act twist revealing that the ultimate threat is not the masked lunatics but rather the seemingly harmless neighbors. It’s exactly the type of thing we’d really fret about if the Purge were real. You know all those people around you who you just implicitly trust to not go on a killing spree at any moment? How well do you actually know them? However, this would wind up being the only film in the franchise to really carry this theme.
Just over one year later, there was The Purge: Anarchy, a sequel widely considered to be better than the original. With a budget much larger than its predecessor, this installment is able to open up the world and show us the broader implications of the Purge. Indeed, Anarchy’s greatest strength is that it’s full of examples of DeMonaco taking the Purge conceit to some inventive places, like having the wealthy pay to kill dying people in the comfort of their homes. There’s enough of this worldbuilding to keep us entertained throughout, and this, combined with Frank Grillo’s presence, adds up to a film that most will leave feeling like they basically got their money’s worth.
But the movie still isn’t a home run. While the original delivered some basic if generic scares, Anarchy, which sees its characters run around the city and encounter random act of violence after random act of violence, all of which is accompanied by a constant, blaring score, has little to offer in that department. Shifting from horror to action was definitely a conscious choice, but there’s a level of intensity that we should still feel throughout the whole movie that isn’t quite there. Shouldn’t a film with such a gnarly premise be relentlessly heart-pounding? Shouldn’t we leave the theater being able to remember even one single scare, nasty death, or moment that made us grab our armrest?
Mostly, it’s just a bunch of random shooting at faceless villains as Frank Grillo tells people to keep moving, and that’s about it. For a movie that involves being stranded in a lawless wasteland for an entire night, the whole thing feels weirdly safe and free of the kind of off-the-rails, visually-striking madness we would expect. Besides, the characters are well-armed enough that we usually don’t get the sense that they’re in much legitimate danger, and the majority of the perilous situations they’re placed in are resolved fairly quickly.
Early on, there’s one sequence in which Eva and Cali’s superintendent comes after them that has potential, going back to this notion of a casual acquaintance suddenly becoming a sinister foe. But his performance is so over the top that it just makes us laugh, and he’s killed off almost instantly. The film’s best scene by far is when the characters take shelter at Eva’s coworker’s house, and things feel subtly off as DeMonaco builds and builds to one of the houseguests pulling out a gun. Though this only lasts about 10 minutes, it just makes us wish the whole movie had been more like this and that DeMonaco had given us chances to feel tense as he actually examined what it is he’s saying about humanity by suggesting something like the Purge could exist in the first place.
Speaking of which, in the original movie, it was a bit odd that the lead characters other than the son did not seem bothered by the idea of the Purge, with everyone in this world treating it so casually, but we could accept that as being evidence of their upper-class privilege. However, Anarchy moves us to a major city and focuses on less wealthy characters who have little to protect themselves with. Despite that, at the start of the film, these people are not nearly as fearful of the Purge as you would think. After all, a couple casually takes a trip in their car and goes for groceries literally right before commencement. Can you imagine how terrified you’d be if in a matter of hours, your city was about to descend into complete chaos and thousands of people were going to die? Sure, the movie is trying to make a point about society becoming desensitized to the horrors around them, but it hasn’t even been that long since the Purge started at this point. Besides, wouldn’t it be nice if we as an audience got more of a feeling that the Purge is a frightening event that we dread as it approaches?
It all got even crazier in 2016 when DeMonaco brought us The Purge: Election Year, which puts the absolutely ludicrous fictional world that previously existed in the background on full display. This sequel bizarrely suggests that after the Purge was introduced, it took 25 years for the general public to begin considering that this ceremony might be a bad thing. In the first two movies, the fact that we kept hearing about the “New Founding Fathers of America,” who refer to themselves as a regime, suggested that this dystopia is drastically different than American society today. But in Election Year, the United States seems to be functioning fairly normally, complete with elections that occur just like ours do; footage from the actual House of Representatives, and presidential debates in which the candidates argue over whether innocent people should be slaughtered, are played as sincerely as an episode of The West Wing.
The implication seems to be that this is a real debate, and Americans have actually been re-electing the openly homicidal NFFA for decades. The New Founding Fathers don’t appear to be rigging the elections, since they’re gravely concerned about Charlie Roan’s growing popularity to the point that they risk their lives in order to have her killed. If this is true, and the Purge was something that could have been ended via a normal election all this time but Americans were complicit in its continuation, this says something profoundly messed up about the country as a whole and suggests that it has bigger problems than just the handful of crazies the characters encounter. But Election Year doesn’t really explore that, and the world of the movie ends up being far too incoherent and poorly fleshed out for its satire to be as cutting as it should be.
It doesn’t help matters that the film is bogged down by the worst dialogue of the entire series. This includes the groan-worthy scene in which a humble deli employee offers the senator a genius tip: that she should try to win Florida, a mind-blowingly shrewd strategy that she evidently never considered before and that later becomes the reason for her victory. When a movie’s idea of political insight is that Florida is important in presidential elections, you know you’re in trouble.
Once again, the action doesn’t always pack the punch that it should, yet even more than before, we’re encouraged to celebrate the kills; one particular sequence involves Betty Gabriel massacring several people, and it clearly exists in order to make us cheer. But if Election Year wants to suggest that it’s awful to see Americans celebrating violence and that killing isn’t the answer, maybe it should actually repulse us with the violence in this movie rather than asking us to cheer it on and making most of it so goofy.
Still, there’s a fair amount that does work about Election Year. The thrust is basically more of what Anarchy had to offer, as we’re placed in a major city during Purge night so we can see the insanity unfolding on every corner. But the streets are filled with more memorable imagery than in Anarchy so that it’s not just one bland firefight after another. This includes a man being beheaded in an alleyway by a guillotine, a vandalized Lincoln Memorial, and, of course, a car covered in Christmas lights blasting “Party in the U.S.A.” What’s not to love about that? Election Year also adds some great new concepts to the table, such as the idea of “murder tourists,” who come into the U.S. just to participate in the ceremony. But in the end, it kind of feels like we’re watching a lineup of images and ideas that would be exceptionally powerful had more been done with them and had they not simply been thrown up on screen in between a fairly rote main storyline.
Things improve quite a bit in the last act with a creepy church sequence. It’s an example of DeMonaco offering something other than just generic action and, for once, basking in the tension without having a character quickly pull out a gun and resolve things. It’s also a case where the movie doesn’t really tether itself to reality that much, so we can accept the over-the-top nature of how all of the villains are behaving. Election Year needed more scenes like these and fewer scenes where politicians hold modern-looking presidential debates about whether murder is good.
So as we look back at these movies, there are basically three key issues that keep coming up. One, for a franchise so heavily based around horrifying violence, the violence itself often ends up feeling strangely weightless, and the audience is never really affected by it in the way that we should be. Two, the world itself is utterly ridiculous, which would be fine if DeMonaco was having more fun with it and we could laugh with him rather than at him.
Finally, and most importantly, DeMonaco comes up with lots of worthwhile ideas, but he never quite does enough with them. His strength is in dreaming up premises that pique our interest when we hear them, or images that make us do a double take when we see them on a poster, but his weakness is in taking these things to a place that is fully satisfying.
So where should the Purge franchise go next? At this point, the ideal path forward might actually involve going back to basics and giving us a film a bit more in line with the original. Anarchy and Election Year addressed the criticisms of the first Purge, showing us what this world is like on a larger scale, but it quickly became repetitive. If the series is to remain fresh, it’s not enough for it to just keep moving to a different city each time and continuing to deliver more of the same.
Instead, why not use The Purge as a framework to tell a variety of different stories set in the same world? What is it like to experience the Purge in other environments? What if the main characters weren’t equipped with fancy security equipment and didn’t always have an arsenal of weapons at their disposal? Do all the films even have to be so focused on gun violence? Can DeMonaco give us a totally different type of Purge movie? Based on the trailer for The First Purge, it doesn’t look like that’s what’s in store this year. But maybe the franchise can move in a new direction for a possible fifth installment or for the upcoming TV show.
Let’s hope it does because, after three enjoyable but highly flawed films, we all deserve one undeniably great Purge.
