THE PURGE: ELECTION YEAR (US - 2016) Written and directed by James DeMonaco. Cast: Frank Grillo, Elizabeth Mitchell, Mykelti Williamson, Edwin Hodge, Betty Gabriel, Kyle Secor, Raymond J. Barry, Terry Serpico, Joseph Julian Soria, Lisa Colon-Zayas, Christopher James Baker, Ethan Phillips, David Aaron Baker, Brittany Mirabile. (R, 109 mins) The latest installment in the most political of today's horror franchises, one that depicts a near-future where the New Founding Fathers have created "Purge Night," the one night a year when murder is legal for 12 hours. What was supposed to placate the nation's rage has turned into literal class warfare, with the rich hunting the poor. THE PURGE: ELECTION YEAR takes advantage of the most ludicrously surreal election season in America's history to represent the DEATH WISH 3-ification of the series. These films, all written and directed by James DeMonaco, have always worn their politics on their sleeve, and after the furious anger of the superior first sequel, THE PURGE: ANARCHY, DeMonaco cranks the absurdity to new heights here. It's easy to look metaphorically at the world presented in THE PURGE: ELECTION YEAR and see it as a harbinger of what a Trump nation would conceivably look like, but the film is so over-the-top and filled with gaping logic holes that, unlike THE PURGE: ANARCHY, it's impossible to take seriously for a moment. Indeed, this film's depiction of the dystopian urban hellscape of Washington, DC makes ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK look like a Norman Rockwell painting.
Taking place several years after the events of ANARCHY, ELECTION YEAR gives us two presidential candidates--liberal Sen. Charlie Roan (Elizabeth Mitchell), who wants to abolish the annual killfest since her family was wiped out during a Purge Night 18 years ago, and the far-right conservative, evangelical, New Founding Fathers-endorsed Rev. Eldridge Owens (Kyle Secor), a talking points-spouting, sermonizing stooge who's the puppet of NFF leader Caleb Warrens (Raymond J. Barry), who's introduced vowing to take out "that cunt Senator." The Purge is sold as the American way, but half the nation is vehemently against it, and Warrens and his high-ranking cohorts push legislation through Congress that changes the rules regarding elected officials. Previously protected from being Purge Night targets, they're now fair game in what's a transparent attempt to goad their acolytes into killing Roan. Against the wishes of her chief of security Leo Barnes (Frank Grillo), the lone-wolf hero of ANARCHY-turned-Secret Service agent here, Roan takes a stand with the average American and against the Purge and spends the night in her own fortified home instead of going to an underground government bunker. Of course, Barnes is the only honest agent on the payroll, as everyone else is in cahoots with the NFF, allowing white supremacist militia leader Earl Danzinger (Terry Serpico) and his team of mercenaries with Confederate flag and white power patches on their uniforms into the house to apprehend Roan and take her to a secret location to be sacrificed by the cult-like NFF. She escapes with Barnes, and they're on the street on their own to survive the night. They eventually meet up with neighborhood deli owner Joe Dixon (Mykelti Williamson), his Mexican immigrant employee Marcos (Joseph Julian Soria) and their neighborhood activist friend and former gang leader Laney Rucker (Betty Gabriel), who drives around the area with Dawn (Lisa Colon-Zayas) as a volunteer EMT team helping those in need.
DeMonaco keeps things fast-moving and incredibly violent as the ragtag group makes their way from one nightmarish set piece to another, dealing with everything from a crew of obnoxious schoolgirls who want revenge against Joe and Laney for kicking them out of the deli when they were caught shoplifting, to a group of vacationing "murder tourists" who come from all over the globe to take part in the legal killing spree. Later on, they're taken in by anti-Purge activist Dante Bishop (Edwin Hodge), the hunted man reluctantly given refuge by Ethan Hawke's family in the first PURGE film, who now leads a group of people determined to assassinate Owens and all of the New Founding Fathers (note to Trump supporters--the New Founding Fathers are supposed to be the villains) at their Purge prayer group at a nearby church. And there's just one rather idiotic element of ELECTION YEAR. Even something like the PURGE franchise needs to stick to its own internal logic, which it fails to do here ("I can't believe we're on the street again," Roan tells Barnes at one point; you'll likely concur). The Purge lasts from 7:00 pm to 7:00 am (apparently, the New Founding Fathers have also done away with time zones). If anyone is fair game now that government officials aren't protected, why would the NFF risk transporting a bunch of their top people and their families to a church service in mid-Purge? And if anyone is fair game, why would people be out picking up the corpses and keeping the streets clean during the Purge? Couldn't that wait until after 7:00 am? I get that Laney and Dawn are concerned citizens driving their own EMT truck and risking their lives as volunteers, but are these clean-up guys other Purgers? Are they city sanitation workers? If so, are they at least getting paid overtime? And while I get that Joe would want to protect his deli from Purgers and vandals, does it make any sense that he'd position himself on the roof of his establishment and start pounding beers, completely oblivious to all of the taller apartment buildings surrounding him from which a sniper could easily take him out? And if the Purge is legal, why all the garish costumes? There's no need to disguise yourself. DeMonaco tries to explain that away by having one mask salesman cackle "It's Halloween for adults!" but it still doesn't make any sense. Has DeMonaco been out on Halloween lately? Halloween is Halloween for adults. Here's an idea: schedule the Purge on Halloween but the only targets can be grown-ass adults who still go trick-or-treating and don't even wear costumes. There's something we can all get behind.
THE PURGE: ANARCHY at least felt plausible as an angry, socially-conscious B-movie, but THE PURGE: ELECTION YEAR is a completely unbelievable cartoon (though the end credits rolling to David Bowie's "I'm Afraid of Americans" is a nice touch). There's no subtlety here whatsoever, but in a way, that's reflective of the politics of today. ELECTION YEAR deals in absolutes. Those fearful of a Trump victory often joke that he'll turn the country into a MAD MAX wasteland, so it's only natural that a franchise with such a liberal-leaning agenda would present that scenario as a reflection of the times. ELECTION YEAR is overblown and heavy-handed, lacking the gritty edge of ANARCHY (by far the best in this series so far) and suffering from a change in attitude for hero Barnes. In ANARCHY, he was a stoical badass that you could get behind, but here, he's pretty much a total dick, while Williamson's Joe and Gabriel's Laney emerge as the most likable heroes. Joe risks his ass for Roan too many times for Barnes to continuously question his motives and derisively refer to him as "Deli Man," seeming more concerned with his own butthurt ego than he is with the Senator's safety. The most prescient moment of ELECTION YEAR is the final shot with a news anchor voiceover, which basically suggests a preview of what's likely to happen at the Republican National Convention. Here's to hoping DeMonaco is already at work on his script for THE PURGE: MEDIUM COOL.
THE PURGE: ANARCHY (US/France - 2014) Written and directed by James DeMonaco. Cast: Frank Grillo, Carmen Ejogo, Zach Gilford, Kiele Sanchez, Zoe Soul, Michael K. Williams, Justina Machado, John Beasley, Jack Conley, Noel G, Edwin Hodge, Keith Stanfield. (R, 104 mins)
Last summer, the $3 million THE PURGE grossed $64 million to become one of season's surprise sleeper hits, despite no one really liking it that much. And yet, exactly one year later, here's THE PURGE: ANARCHY. When any film rakes in 21x its budget, a sequel is going to happen whether you want one or not. A year is a long time, and a lot of people have forgotten that over half of that $64 million came from the opening weekend before the negative word-of-mouth spread, sending the film on a precipitous 76% freefall in its second weekend. THE PURGE had a great concept, one that was ripe for social and political commentary: five years into the future, unemployment and crime are an all-time low, due to the revamped US government, overseen by a group of elected officials known as "The Founding Fathers" having legalized "The Purge," a one-night, 12-hour block of time where all crime, including murder, is legal, thereby allowing everyone to get a year's worth of rage out of their systems and allow society to flourish. It's the kind of dystopian high concept that could've led to an incendiary metaphor for the divisive state of the world today. But writer/director James DeMonaco blew it. After the intriguing set-up, THE PURGE quickly devolved into a rote, run-of-the-mill home invasion thriller, with a well-to-do family led by dad Ethan Hawke and mom Lena Headey under siege by a group of privileged thrill-killers trying to get in their locked-down house after they give shelter to young African-American man.
DeMonaco (who scripted 1998's THE NEGOTIATOR and the 2005 remake of ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13) is back for THE PURGE: ANARCHY, and he's more or less admitted that he bungled the first film and is attempting to set things right. For the entire duration of THE PURGE, I kept wondering what an in-his-prime John Carpenter might've done with such an idea. That's a big shift in the direction that DeMonaco takes with the sequel, a sort-of PURGE 2.0, if you will, that jumps ahead to 2023, opening up the action and taking it to the streets as we follow a group of strangers thrown together to survive the night. There's low-income single mom Eva (Carmen Ejogo) and her teenage daughter Cali (Zoe Soul), nearly killed by riot-geared soldiers rounding people up in a high-tech truck; about-to-split married couple Shane (Zach Gilford) and Liz (Kiele Sanchez), stranded on the highway when their car breaks down on the way home; and a nameless mystery man (Frank Grillo) armed to the teeth on a mission of vengeance in a souped-up, steel-covered Italian-post-nuke-looking hot rod, who ends up rescuing them and reluctantly becoming their protector.
THE PURGE: ANARCHY doesn't really hold up under much scrutiny, but it's a vast improvement over the first film. While putting the heroes in a position to make their way across an urban hellscape may bring to mind everything from THE WARRIORS (1979) to the underrated JUDGMENT NIGHT (1993), DeMonaco keeps things moving at a fast clip and offers some striking imagery like ominous overhead shots or a school bus engulfed in flames speeding by in the background. He also has a lot of interesting if not fully-baked ideas while taking some crowd-pleasing shots at easy targets, like the bloody, mutilated remains of a stockbroker, chained up and hanging outside of a bank in the financial district, sporting a hand-written shame-sign stating that he stole the pensions of middle-class workers ("Maybe he deserved it," Shane muses as they stare up at the body), or a large gathering of Botoxed one-percenters holding an auction where the highest bidders get to go on a canned hunt of some captured underclass in an enclosed recreation area, fist-bumping as they don night-vision glasses to make the hunt easier. There's also Carmelo Jones (Michael K. Williams), leader of an online revolutionary organization determined to overthrow the Founding Fathers and expose their SNOWPIERCER-like plan for society. DeMonaco wears his politics on his sleeve, basically shooting fish in a barrel with the points he makes in ANARCHY (SPOILER ALERT: if you think the Botoxed one-percenters and the dead stockbroker are the victims, then you're probably not part of the target audience), but taken at face value, it's exactly the kind of subversive, cynical little B-movie--think CAGED HEAT or DEATH RACE 2000--that Roger Corman would've shepherded in the 1970s. Some action sequences get a little shaky-cammy and one is murkier than it should be, but the entire project gets a huge boost by a terrific lone-wolf performance from veteran character actor Grillo, playing a man who's lost everything and is using The Purge as a last-ditch way of setting things right. His character arc is predictable, but Grillo is perfect in the role, speaking volumes with a squint or a look of disgust, and it's easy to see why the terrified quartet latches on to him after he tries to extricate himself from them and continue on his mission. It's also nice that DeMonaco doesn't make the others into stock cowards and whiners--Liz turns out to be a crack shot, and Cali is a smart kid with wisdom beyond her years, and the protective father-daughter bond that develops between her and the mystery man is well-played by Soul and Grillo. THE PURGE: ANARCHY isn't a great film and it can be kind of dumb, but it's undeniably entertaining and works on a visceral, red-meat level.
Written and directed by James DeMonaco. Cast: Ethan Hawke, Lena Headey, Adelaide Kane, Max Burkholder, Edwin Hodge, Rhys Wakefield, Tony Oller, Arija Bareikis, Chris Mulkey, Tisha French, Dana Bunch, Tom Yi. (R, 85 mins)
The dystopian home invasion thriller THE PURGE is set in 2022 America, a few years after the "New Founding Fathers" have salvaged the economy and rebuilt the country due in large part to the annual Purge: one night a year, from 7:00 pm to 7:00 am (perhaps the New Founding Fathers also instituted a singular, nationwide time zone), all crime is legal, with the exception of acts committed against certain ranks of government or police officials, and nothing above "Class 4" weapons can be used, presumably to rule out mass killings, domestic terrorism, etc. By allowing these 12 hours of cathartic release--the slogan is "Release the Beast!"--everyone theoretically gets all of the aggression, anger, and negativity out of their system for 364 more days. You can kill your boss, your cheating spouse, or anyone else who's pissed you off and be free from prosecution and the consequences. But "Purgers" are primarily the rich and entitled targeting the poor and the perceived societal moochers, the "filthy swine" that now exist only to serve as targets for The Purge. Critics of The Purge argue that it's just a new way for the one-percenters to take out their frustration against the less fortunate--the lower class and the homeless, though even its critics concede that it appears to be working.
James Sandin (Ethan Hawke) lives in a gated, suburban enclave with his wife Mary (Lena Headey), rebellious teenage daughter Zoey (Adelaide Kane), and shy, tech-nerd son Charlie (Max Burkholder). The Sandins are living large, thanks to James being the top sales rep with a local security company. He sold high-tech security systems to all of his neighbors in preparation for The Purge and now has the biggest, gaudiest house on the block, which is pointed out to Mary by friendly neighbor Grace (Arija Bareikis) as she drops off some cookies, telling Mary "A lot of the neighbors think they paid for all the additions to your house...but it's just neighborly gossip." The politically neutral James doesn't necessarily agree with The Purge, but displays the blue flowers of support for it outside his house and is happy that it's provided him with so much money and material goods (he's thinking about buying a boat with its own parking garage simply because he can afford it, even as he chuckles "Who would need a car on a boat?"). The Sandins settle in for The Purge with their house on steel-vaulted lockdown, but that ends quickly when Charlie sees an injured African-American man (Edwin Hodge) stumbling down the street, crying out for help. Charlie disarms the security system and lets the man in. It turns out he was being pursued by a group of college-aged masked revelers and other products of privilege having a "Purge Party." The leader (Rhys Wakefield) demands the Sandins turn over the man, a homeless war veteran, but that proves difficult when, in the confusion over Charlie disarming the system in the first place, the man is able to run off and hide somewhere in the house. The eccentric Purge leader (Wakefield's character is in the credits as "Polite Stranger") demands James turn over the man or they'll dismantle the security system and enter to house to kill them all, explaining that "You're one of us, Mr. Sandin. We don't want to do this to you and your family." The family splits up to search for the homeless man and deal with other troubles--Zoey's boyfriend (Tony Oller) managed to sneak into the house earlier to have some words with James--but the Polite Stranger runs out of patience, ordering his Purging companions to launch a full-scale attack on the Sandin mansion.
THE PURGE is written and directed by James DeMonaco, who's got some experience with these sort-of "siege" situations, scripting 1998's excellent THE NEGOTIATOR and the surprisingly good 2005 remake of John Carpenter's ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13. Hawke starred in the PRECINCT 13 remake, and he and DeMonaco are good buddies who also worked together on 2009's little-seen STATEN ISLAND, NEW YORK. DeMonaco introduces some very politically-charged exposition in THE PURGE but it soon gets sidelined as much of the film turns into your standard home-invasion thriller that owes a tremendous debt to Sam Peckinpah's STRAW DOGS (1971) and the more recent THE STRANGERS (2008), in addition to a first-season STAR TREK episode titled "The Return of the Archons," which DeMonaco actually cited as an inspiration for the "Purge" period of lawlessness. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as THE PURGE often works on a purely visceral level, especially in some of the incredibly violent confrontations in the third act (it's hard not to feel the adrenaline when James not only buries an axe in a Purger's back, but then blows his head off for good measure), but the very concept is crying out for more substance--more bite--than DeMonaco chooses to give it. It doesn't really explore the critiques that it lays out--greed, entitlement, selfishness, the inherently violent nature of America today--and instead opts to become a mostly by-the-numbers thriller, at least until it's shown that the have-mores can be just as despised as the have-nots. But even then, it builds to a weak finish, and in films like this, the house (or whatever structure is under siege) must also be a character in the sense that the viewer must know the layout and the basic floor plan, otherwise it makes no sense. We never get the tour of the Sandin home and it's such a maze that we never really know where people are. Once the Purgers force their way in and start pursuing the family and the homeless man, it seems ludicrous that 8-12 people can wander through a house and down long hallways and not run into anyone else for long periods. Perhaps the intent was to illustrate how ridiculously big the house is, but I doubt it.
Given its invasion/siege plot, I couldn't stop thinking about what someone like the aforementioned John Carpenter--in full-on, angry THEY LIVE mode--could've done with this concept. DeMonaco obviously finds Carpenter an inspiration, not just in his previous work scripting the PRECINCT 13 remake, but also in some of THE PURGE's suspense sequences being punctuated with the kind of driving, repetitious score that makes Carpenter films so identifiable. A hypothetical "John Carpenter's THE PURGE"--or say, Paul Verhoeven or George A. Romero or even Joe Dante--other genre filmmakers who have expertly balanced suspense/horror with eviscerating social commentary--would've fully explored and fleshed-out the political ramifications of THE PURGE, while DeMonaco only hints at them early and late, with the bulk of the film feeling overly familiar. As far as summer movies go, it's fast-moving, never boring, knows how long to stick around (the credits start rolling just shy of the 80-minute mark), and the performances are fine, especially Headey, who's very good toward the end. THE PURGE isn't bad, but it could've followed through on its premise and been something a little more substantive.
