The Forever Purge
Everardo Gout, 2021,
Maybe the best thing you can say for The Forever Purge, which was originally slated for release in July of 2020, is that it cleverly predicts January 6th, at least until you remember that the loudest man on the planet had a global captive audience that year, not limited to his devoted cult of wackos, and anyone with half a brain cell could read the tea leaves.
In perhaps the series’s most ham-fisted attempt at social commentary yet, this purportedly final installment sees a nationwide horde of insurgents blowing past the Purge’s 12-hour window for legalized murder. The film’s proletariat boosterism is muddled early in the game when a ranch hand fomenting a worker uprising is supposed to be the bad guy, but it soon settles into the series’s now-familiar pattern of loquacious white-power types on the warpath, this time with a focus on exterminating Latin American immigrants. This might have been said to foresee MAGA’s self-actualization—our current domestic nightmare of vicious, unaccountable deportation raids—except that for some reason, the totalitarian government who created the Purge tries to stop this wholesale slaughter of working-class Brown people. (Not even the guy who was cynical enough to write five Purge screenplays thought a second Trump administration would be as bad as it is.)
I suppose what follows qualifies as action in that it is brutally violent and an eye-watering amount of ammunition is spent, but it is anything but thrilling.
