There are a fair few “ripped from the headlines” scenes to be found throughout.
“Witness the birth of an American tradition” warns the poster’s tagline, and while it was intended to tell the audience that they should get ready to watch how murder-night all kicked off, it also doubles as a description of the franchise itself.
Back in June 2013, we got the first Purge (lower case f), a tight-knit horror movie with Ethan Hawke and Queen Cersei in a not-too-distant future America, as two believers in the system who find themselves on the receiving end of a murderous gang’s violent intentions.
Despite not being very good (37% on Rotten Tomatoes), the $3 million production made just shy of $100 million at the worldwide box office, so of course a sequel was on the way.
July 2014 brought us The Purge: Anarchy, followed by The Purge: Election Night in July 2016, both of which were better than the original (56% and 55%, respectively), and made slightly more money at cinemas ($112 million and $118 million), but that second sequel really set up a potentially great future for the franchise, as it dealt with a female Presidential candidate looking to change America for the better.
It was a nice parallel to the now-parallel universe in which Hillary Clinton rules the States with a competent fist, but instead we got the Trump version, and it looked like The Purge was going to properly take aim at the new world order, as could be seen by the movie’s first poster for The First Purge (capital f).
Produced by Michael Bay (who is just coming off a horror win with A Quiet Place) and Jason Blum (the guy who assisted in skewering racial politics so perfectly with Get Out), there was hope that this could go all in, and properly make a horror about Trump’s America.
It goes back to the very first Purge night, put in place to deal with overpopulation and rising crime rates, and the reasoning behind how it becomes a reality isn’t exactly believable, but it doesn’t completely buckle the suspension of disbelief.
What does the movie in is the fact that it can’t decide if it wants to be a dark political commentary, or a dark horror movie, and ends up being neither, and somehow winds up as a weird action-thriller about racial tensions.
Without putting too fine a point on it, every single Caucasian person in the movie is evil, and practically every single person of colour (including the drug lord and the serial killer) is good, or gets a moment of redemption.
The set-pieces also seem like they were “ripped from the headlines”, and then had a plot somehow forcefully molded around them. A mass shooting at a black church, Russian interference with the outcome of the night, the KKK being legally backed by the leaders, white police officers closing in on a single black victim, but the ultimate Trump reference comes when leading lady Nya (Lex Scott Davis) gets attacked by a sexual assaulter on the street.
Partially tied up, Nya spots her attacker – who is wearing a babydoll’s face on his mouth, which screams “GA-GA!” non-stop throughout – who then proceeds to, and there’s no other way to put this, grab her by the genitals.
Fighting him off, Nya escapes, before screaming back at him “Pussy-grabbing motherfucker!”
It should be scary, and while it is kind of smart, it just ends up being funny. Which surely can’t have been the goal with a scene about attempted rape.
We appreciate the intent, The First Purge, but you just don’t have the IQ, or apparently the balls, to pull off a proper political statement (a la The Handmaid’s Tale), and in the process, you’ve completely stopped being a horror movie.
Headlines from the real world are far more psychologically scarring than this, so here’s hoping the next Purge, or even the upcoming TV series, will try harder.
The First Purge is in Irish cinemas from Wednesday 4 July.
Clip via Universal Pictures
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