2021 Reviews – The Forever Purge

To me, the Purge is a film series that has always failed to measure up to its most intriguing premise; that is, that the United States have introduced a day where all crime is legal, that has helped saved a nation from itself, as the annual Purge has been shown to quell crime and civil unrest for the rest of the year. That’s one night of unadulterated violence, and it leads to a very interesting question – how much of your nation’s morality are you willing to give up for a founding of peace? Even from the beginning, an undercurrent has always been there, that this law naturally advantages the rich over the poor, as one can afford heightened security measures if they choose not to take part in the Purge, and the other is exposed to the slaughter. As the series has gone on, that idea has been more heavily leaned upon to reflect America’s own frustrations regarding wealth distribution and racial inequality, exploding in The First Purge, the fourth franchise instalment that came out recently; during a time when a lot of Hollywood movies saw and took their opportunities to berate the sitting Republican President. I think it was the late great Norm McDonald that I first heard make the point that, ‘Trump jokes… they’re easy.’ Rightly or wrongly, they’re just not very clever. And to tangle up literal politics with a barbaric premise like the Purge is both shameless and dangerous, I think. I found The First Purge literally disgusting for that reason, and it takes a bit for art to offend me – perhaps only this and Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi recently. Yet the completionist in me needs to see what direction this franchise can be steered in next, although my expectations are through the ground.

The Forever Purge follows a group of workers and owners on a Texas ranch, as they prepare for the upcoming Purge – following on from the events of The Purge: Election Year, the New Founding Fathers have been re-elected into office, and haven’t hesitated in reinstating the Purge straightaway. Adela (Ana de la Reguera) and Juan (Tenoch Huerta) recently immigrated from Mexico, and spend their first Purge night in an abandoned warehouse, where the poor can pay mercenary soldiers to protect them. Ranch-owners Dylan (Josh Lucas) and his pregnant wife Cassidy (Cassie Freeman), his sister Harper (Leven Rambin) and their father Caleb (Will Patton), stay at home with their sturdy security measures in place, while the rest of America enact their ‘civil liberties’. As morning comes, our characters prepare to go back to work, but Adela and Dylan both fall into two separate instances where purging is still taking place, with perpetrators calling this ‘the forever purge’, and promising things will never go back to normal again. Pretty soon, the entire country is in chaos, and our group must bind together in a quest to find safety.

To my surprise, there’s a lot about this movie that I really like. I like the dynamic of our group of travellers, consisting of what is essentially small business owners and their workers; they’re not any sort of special officials or experts, or anything traditionally bad-ass, but just regular folk. The movie flirts with Dylan being a threat to his Mexican employees over time, but when the ultimate danger comes from elsewhere, the movie allows a small room for character development as Dylan and Juan shed their grievances and find an essential mutual respect. I like how the movie juxtaposed how the landowners and the immigrants spent their Purge nights, and with all the dread I took away from The First Purge, it’s nice to see a good-natured facility that specialises in protecting the weak and less fortunate. There’s also a tiny snippet of the aftermath of the Purge – the clean-up, the wolves on the street, and the lack of employees at Adela’s processing factory the next day – which is something the movies haven’t focused on before, and I found those few moments intriguing; the Purge is actually terrible, and the more graphic examples indicating so, make it all the more alluring that people support it, and that there’s rationale behind it. It’s interesting that the media is no longer endorsing the Purge as well, either coming disenfranchised with the concept themselves, or no longer perpetrating the lie of the good-will of the Purge, whatever the truth may be.

I also found the movie to be less preoccupied with jump-scares than previous instalments, which is of welcome relief – I mean, they’re still here, but it’s like they now exist out of obligation rather than necessity. The Forever Purge is chilling, because it uses its narrative to find the scares, like how all the reasonable people fleeing the violence are getting slaughtered at the jammed boarders; and so, there’s less need for the movie to promote stalking spooky-maskers and psycho-girls who want their candy bars(!). If anything, I think the movie loses steam when it puts a face to the chaos, having a group of forever-purgers ambush our group and spew their self-serving agenda. And where the last two movies especially, focused on a corrupt government, I prefer that this is frankly, just morons being dicks. This is a mutiny, and The Forever Purge sees a civilised country fall; and this movie’s direction proves more than capable of capturing the terrifying impact of this large-scale catastrophe. Director Everardo Gout, even stages a 1917-inspired one-shot sequence through the guerrilla warfare and I was captivated. This is also a very pro-Mexican and pro-immigrant film, and whilst I don’t pretend that I know all the facts or policy about either, I can understand the sentiment and gravitate towards it for this movie.

I’m sure The Forever Purge is more aligned with my own sentiments, which is why I can embrace this movie and condemn The First Purge, despite the stories coming from the same franchise writer, James DeMonaco. Plus, it must be said that The First Purge was a prequel, that went down the route of confirming that the Purge has always been a government conspiracy, since day dot, which is just not how I thought I was originally sold the Purge, and government conspiracy plotlines can be so tiresome and a dime a dozen. Yet, if art is supposed to imitate life – our desires, or the ugly truths we are sometimes otherwise blind to – then to grasp it is to identify the themes and recognise them. I am believing that this Purge could happen this way, and I can see its parallels to concerns in the real world transparently – anger spreads in secret online groups, and the rhetoric supposedly tolerated through systemic political channels permits these groups to decide one day that they’ve had enough; the US had the Capital riots at the end of last year, and we’ve just had our own violent organised protests in Melbourne regarding vaccines. I have to remember, that even from the second movie in this franchise, I noted that the behavioural benefits that the Purge was originally said to have, were not there, and so, perhaps the path that I’ve always wanted to walk down with this franchise was never in DeMonaco’s mind to begin with. Even before I knew where this movie was heading, I did have an idea for a different storyline where the immigrants use the Purge night to challenge the ranch owners and take it; setting up a debate between the haves and the have-nots, that would have been less clear on who the bad guys were, and perhaps even framed the Mexicans in, at least, a greyly-shaded way, which would have never been aligned with these movie’s often left-leaning starting-point. And on top of all this, it could be argued that these Purge movies are also pretty basic, and don’t require so much analysis 😂 but I think they’ve always strived for more. I may have never have been aligned with the direction of this franchise, but I’m still happy to see the fruition of an idea I can get behind, and I actually think that The Forever Purge may be the best movie of the lot.

3.5