The Purge: Election Year (2016) – Hooptober Challenge #3
Requirements:
- Countries (3/6) – USA
- Decades (3/8) – 2010s
I started thinking about the Roman Empire meme/trend, which is really gonna date the crap out of this review preamble– but so be it. I started thinking about the whole Roman Empire thing, and then I started thinking about The Purge. Not the movie, the concept. It’s easy to throw one’s head back and casually mumble something about how the current state of affairs (no matter what ‘side’ you’re on) makes the idea that America might embrace one night of lawlessness in order to purify us and make us good and obedient citizens the rest of the year not sound so far-fetched. It’s the Roman Empire corollary– we’ve grown too fat or too far from our founding principles and find ourselves in a place where potentially the lunatics rule the asylum.
But I’ll suggest that I find that sort of thinking reductive. On its outside, this film series, which is a satire (I hope it stays that way), plays off of how far gone the world could be without stretching our imagination all that much. I thought it through a little further and came up with some reasons it just couldn’t happen. Not to put my mind at ease, mind you. Just as a thought exercise.
The main reason that it’s not happening anytime soon is because one night of excused lawlessness would just embolden groups of powerful people (businesses, governments, secret societies, hacker gangs, etc.) to commit large-scale financial crimes. And the reason that would be a problem is because regardless of who those target, it would inevitably cause financial strain on another group of powerful people. There could be some sort of ‘cold war’ theory where people believed that mutually assured financial destruction would stop the players from playing, but the fear of that theory not holding weight is what would stop a Purge from ever being passed as law. There’s too much risk of constant destabilization.
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A second reason is that people are too messed up for it to work right. If a full Purge existed, there are enough people out there who’d turn the scale of mayhem into competition. You’d have a full-on arms race of terrorism and mass murder. If limits were placed on it, it would still be too much of a permissiveness shown to already-unstable individuals. It would devalue life in our everyday ethical equations to the extent that it would be just that much easier to do the unthinkable for some.
Another reason, let’s call it 2B because it’s related to the above: There would be year-round coverage and celebrity about it. If it ever happened, the initial rush to gain more coverage or name recognition would push the whole affair apocalyptic immediately. It would provoke the government to be more invasive/thought crime-y to enforce that people don’t commit the crime of planning for The Purge ahead of time (that would have to be a rule to get it off the ground without breaking it beforehand, theoretically). That would, in turn, cause chaos and rebellion from the people if extrapolated.
So, in conclusion, I guess what I’m trying to say is, “I thought about this too much.”
I’m going to try to do this without getting overly political. I know how tempers can flare. The Purge series, for those who are unfamiliar (and who didn’t read my preamble on Horror Geek Life), is about a dystopian near-future America whose newest foundational building block is built on a single night in which all of the citizenry is absolved of any crime they commit during that night. It has a large religious component to it for the ruling party/greatest proponent of The Purge. It’s a really solid concept with legs and, for my money, will always give these movies some critical brownie point house money to start with.
The first flick held promise but, overall, felt lacking in its execution. The second in the series was a pleasant surprise. In fact, I enjoyed it enough that it gave me hope that the entire series would be solid. This third entry was a bit of a letdown as far as that’s concerned, but that’s not to say that the movie has no merit.
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One of the greatest tricks James DeMonaco ever pulled was convincing us that The Purge could be an action film just as much as it could be a horror film. DeMonaco is the writer/director/creator. That is the spinning strength that The Purge: Anarchy had… and that is one of the biggest flaws of its follow-up Election Year. This film leans too far into that mold and becomes a thriller at heart instead of a horror or action film. Frank Grillo’s Leo Barnes character returns from #2 as a Secret Service-like bodyguard for an aspiring (and vehemently anti-Purge) presidential candidate who’s out to win hearts and minds. The character reads like he was cobbled from spare parts of MacGyver and Jack Ryan. The right move would have been to pull further back into the horror foundation.
So we have a thriller where the establishment pretty nakedly maneuvers to take their budding political rival out during Purge Night. On that front, it works alright. It’s a C to C- of a film. It’s predictable, it’s preachy, it’s pretty (in its own hyper-stylized ‘big moment’ kind of way), and it’s paper thin.
While we have Barnes protecting his employer, Senator Roan, and downplaying the sexual tension between them, we have a competing storyline. We focus on the fantastic Betty Gabriel and her beat on the streets of the inner city on Purge Night. It gets hinted at that she is something of a known quantity and legend in her circle– and we soon find out that she’s a vigilante and armored paramedic who’s both prowling and protecting. It’s a cool concept with really sloppy execution. Her character is grounded by the adopted family of a local shop’s ecosystem. The character of Joe Dixon smacks of a well-worn trope attributed to African-American men. The rest of the good guy characters also fall prey to stereotypes and flat characterization.
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The two storylines merge. There’s a neat little moment where the average Joe’s out-badass Grillo/Barnes, and the rest plays out like we’ve all seen coming from the cookie cutter. I don’t want to completely kick the movie, but I do want to point out that it probably isn’t a good idea to take up space in a script with characters reminiscing about a mediocre-at-best catch-phrase from another character introduced to us in the same movie– it feels forced and empty and lazy.
The movie gets points for introducing the idea of rogue paramedics fighting the night. And I dig the concept of murder tourism entering the picture. Lastly, and this is something that’s been a hallmark of the movies, the masking of the perpetrators is pretty damn audacious and interesting. Overall, it’s entertaining but just a little too dumb and misguided to be called good. But it’s just entertaining and interesting enough to keep me watching the sequels.
