The First Purge
Gerard McMurray, 2018,
Like the other films in the franchise, The First Purge’s clear polemical ambitions are paved over by commercial ones. But this one’s blaxploitation revival is a bigger missed opportunity, because it might have really had something to say.
At the top, a montage of TV news talking heads gives us a cursory history of the rise of the New Founding Fathers of America, an autocratic political party whose introduction of the Purge, an annual 12 hours of lawlessness, is sold as an outlet for national catharsis while not so secretly being a white supremacist campaign of genocide. I don’t mind so much that the only nuance to these NFFA guys is that they don’t have actual mustaches to twirl, especially since we now know just how much damage real-life cartoon villains in American government can do. But a little factual context for the Purge’s fictional ethnic cleansing would go a long way toward giving it any actual weight, from the well known legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, to the lesser discussed history of eugenics-biased sterilization and redlining, to more modern algorithmic racism around housing, medicine, and criminal justice. None of this stuff is even alluded to, and not out of any deference to the audience’s intelligence.
So what might have been a stirring call to political action is instead another exercise in blockbuster knuckle dragging, especially once it follows the franchise template of drifting from stabby suspense (where are these Purge people always getting all these machetes?) to NRA fever dream, inevitably minting a new superhuman army of one to miraculously mow down all the bad guys.
