There Is Only One Great Purge Movie
Screenwriter James DeMonaco was probably able to sell his script for The Purge on the strength of the concept alone. A dystopian future America in which all crime is legal for 12 hours a year is a great high-concept horror premise that unsurprisingly launched a lucrative franchise. But the first Purge film squandered that premise with a generic home invasion thriller. There’s barely any worldbuilding – just a band of masked creeps terrorizing a family. It plays like Hush or The Strangers. The Purge might as well not be going on outside the house.
The sequels to The Purge have dug into the expanded universe in more depth, but ever since the third movie – 2016’s The Purge: Election Year – the filmmakers have gone way overboard with the politics. Although The Purge is tailor-made to broadly satirize issues like gun violence and rising crime rates, the third film crammed it through the narrow lens of one election cycle. Since then, the franchise has leaned too heavily into unsubtle political commentary, singularly focused on the policies of the Trump administration. The most recent entry, The Forever Purge, is all about protecting America’s borders.
A Sixth Purge Movie (Featuring A Familiar Face) Is On The Way
From Election Year on, the New Founding Fathers of America became a caricature of the alt-right. This could’ve been a smart move that put real-world villains in a horror context, but it’s let down by a tactless approach that takes the political parallels too far. The protagonist is a thinly veiled Hillary Clinton stand-in: an anti-Purge presidential candidate being targeted by Purge-loving domestic terrorists. Each subsequent sequel has doubled down on heavy-handed political satire that blandly references recent events.
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