The catharsis brought about from the fictional “purge” – the 12 hours every year when all crime is legal – has become somewhat similar to that felt by some audiences watching each new entry in the franchise. Ever since the second film opened up the universe only teased at in the original, series creator James DeMonaco has made strides, clumsy as they might be, to infuse the mayhem with a thin vein of angry social commentary, loosely specific to the time of release.
With 2014’s The Purge: Anarchy, it was class warfare. In 2016’s The Purge: Election Year, it was quite predictably politics. In 2018’s The First Purge, it was about racial tension. Each one bristled with more anger than the last, giving bloodthirsty crowds a reason to cheer as Nazis, racists and xenophobes got their comeuppance. With the latest, and hopefully last, entry, The Forever Purge (arriving after two seasons of a rather dull TV series), the focus is on immigration, the action centered on the border wall and how white nationalist purgers try to extend the mandated chaos in order to “purify” the country. It’s brutal, bracing stuff for the multiplex but once again, an easy target is missed. On the one hand, it’s admirable that a wide-releasing horror franchise would go to great lengths to Say Something but on the other, what it has to say is so cartoonishly blunt that one questions what effect it really has.
In this gloomy new installment, it’s time for the purge once again, the umpteenth one for America (referred to as the “United States of hate” here) but the first for Mexican immigrant couple Adela (an effectively enraged Ana de la Reguera) and Juan (Tenoch Huerta). Tensions are already thick for them in Texas and so an annual government-approved killing spree is not something they’re particularly excited about. After securing safe shelter for the night, they re-enter the world, surprised yet suspicious that they made it through. But they soon discover that for some, the purge isn’t over. A rebel group has decided that 12 hours isn’t enough and their primary target is anyone they don’t deem to be a true American.
There’s always this curious hypocrisy within the Purge series that lambasts the violent instincts of the masses, then urges us to take great pleasure in watching those same impulses get indulged. Is it us who are ultimately being critiqued for paying to go see a gory horror film, eating popcorn as innocent people are being thrill-killed? That would be a smug Haneke-esque motive but it would at least be something. The Purge films are never quite as thought through, a rambling thesis drunkenly scrawled onto a bar napkin that never really makes a lot of sense. The stabs at satire here are laughably unsubtle (a white supremacist refers to two Mexicans as “bad hombres” before referring to his girlfriend as “Mother”) yet delivered with a silly sense of winking pride, like we should be impressed that they even made the tiniest of effort.
After the all guns-blazing finale of The First Purge, the follow-up continues the franchise’s conscious move away from horror and further into action, which means that while the film is never scary, and never really tries to be, there’s at least a pacey escalation of set-pieces, decent enough to keep us awake but generic enough for us to forget them soon after. First-time director Everardo Valerio Gout is a competent technical hand but he’s hemmed in by DeMonaco’s writing, which uneasily sways from the real world horror of white supremacy to the big screen horror of cheesy one-liners. It’s hard to know how seriously we’re supposed to take any of this when it’s so unclear what the makers’ intention is and so the film’s deeper cuts fail to truly wound because so much of it is mired in silliness.
The expansion of the Purge universe (from home invasion thriller to full-on border battle) has brought with it frustrating echoes of good ideas and some effectively jolting moments of brutality, but it’s a franchise continually buckling under the weight of what it thinks it is and what it thinks it’s saying. The Forever Purge might imply that purging will never end but, unless a major series refresh is on the way, let’s hope that’s not the case.
The Forever Purge is out in the US on 4 July and in the UK on 16 July
