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Rob Weychert

The Purge: Election Year

James DeMonaco, 2016,

I’m not having a good month, and these Purge movies are not helping. But will I stop watching them? Apparently I will not.

There’s a MacGuffin this time, an anti-Purge senator (Elizabeth Mitchell) whose presidential bid aims to upend the barbaric status quo, which of course makes her a target. After narrowly escaping an assassination attempt, she flees her home, and it just so happens the head of her security detail is Leo Barnes (Frank Grillo), the Purge savant from the last film, The Purge: Anarchy, who now has to shepherd another hapless civilian through another Mischief Night on steroids.

The snappy rhythmic strengths of Anarchy are retained here, and Mitchell and Grillo make an engaging pair, but no one else onscreen really pulls their weight, least of all baddie Kyle Secor (of Homicide: Life on the Streets and Veronica Mars fame), a political paper tiger embodying a white-collar version of the more street-level Purge participants’ most overbearing theater-kid tendencies. Even more than all the homicidal mayhem, living through the Purge’s endless grandiose speeches and self-consciously “menacing” costumes and dances seems like it would be insufferable.

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The Purge film poster

The Purge

In keeping with this year’s ad hoc and mostly lowbrow Robtober, and since most of the Purge movies are available on streaming services I currently have access to, I’m reluctantly giving them a go. I didn’t hate this one any less than the first time I saw it; it’s perhaps the low-water mark of boneheaded Blumhouse mediocrity, with a kindergarten-level attempt at social commentary, cut-rate cinematography, and the most irritating villain this side of Martin… See more →

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The Purge: Anarchy film poster

The Purge: Anarchy

I couldn’t find any indication that Jello Biafra was offered a cameo in The Purge: Anarchy, which seems like an injustice given that it’s essentially a film adaptation of Dead Kennedys’ “Kill the Poor,” albeit an adaptation whose 104-minute runtime is markedly less incisive than what the DK song manages to say in a mere 180 seconds.

Still, Anarchy is an unqualified improvement over the first Purge film, whose one-note home-invasion plot Anarchy upgrades to… See more →

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The Purge: Election Year film poster

The Purge: Election Year

I’m not having a good month, and these Purge movies are not helping. But will I stop watching them? Apparently I will not.

There’s a MacGuffin this time, an anti-Purge senator (Elizabeth Mitchell) whose presidential bid aims to upend the barbaric status quo, which of course makes her a target. After narrowly escaping an assassination attempt, she flees her home, and it just so happens the head of her security detail is Leo Barnes (Frank… See more →

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The First Purge film poster

The First Purge

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… See more →

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