The First Purge

2018 prequel

Rating: 13/20

Plot: The first purge.

Galatians 5:16: "Thou shalt not purge. Or go ahead and purge all you want. Yeah, go ahead and purge."

This movie, dealing with a government experiment allowing citizens to commit crimes for twelve hours, might inspire a viewer to consider what they would do in a similar situation. Put me in that cluster of people who would cower for twelve hours. I'm not creative enough to come up with a cool mask or anything, and I'm not as opportunistic as some of the folks in this movie who engage in a little light arson by setting off homemade bombs in the middle of the street and then hooting and hollering like the morons in my hometown who were playing with fireworks last week. Or the guys who take advantage of the opportunity to do some gnarly wheelies on dirt bikes or have sex outdoors.

My favorites are the trio of elderly women pushing shopping carts full of dolls, by the way. They turn out to be more diabolical than you'd expect during a fun scene with some poorly-executed movie explosions.

The best character is a terrifying over-the-top creep named Skeletor played by Rotimi Paul. This character is white America's worst nightmare. Along with the scary masks, Skeletor is the best representation of the visceral horrors in The First Purge. When this is effective as a sci-fi horror movie, it's because they do a good job making human beings these cartoonish monsters. A walk down an alley for one character is particularly strong in creating this sci-fi horror vibe, and the contacts that participants are required to wear give them this especially menacing look.

Of course, those are just the superficial horrors. The real horrors for some would be the allusions to the current presidential administration and their policies. It's not that anything Purge-like could actually be in America's future; it's more that it's not all that far off from policies that could be a part of America's future. Rhetoric about "reviving" America, rather than making it great again, and the American dream; the intentional use of a fictional president who is monosyllabic, a Chief of Staff who looks an awful lot like one Sean Spicer; and a bit of dialogue about a "pussy-grabbing motherfucker" all make this timelier than it ever should have been. I'm shocked that the makers of this didn't include some tiki torches because there's one moment where seeing those would have been very effective.

And that clash of different kinds of horror might be where this thing's lost its mind a bit. I'm not sure you can satirize the MAGA movement while at the same time using black people in an inner-city setting as some sort of monsters. Of course, that might be part of the subversive quality of this which might be a stroke of genius. I don't know enough about the work of director Gerard McMurray, who was an associate producer for Fruitvale Station, or writer James DeMonaco, who wrote and directed the other Purge movies, to really know what they're getting at there. The satire isn't exactly nuanced. I'm surprised they didn't have an orange president actually. I appreciated both the obvious (the KKK visuals) and the less obvious (the media's implication in this sort of thing), but there were times when this was closer to being a "greatest shit show on Earth" instead of something profound.

It does work as an action movie which is exactly what it either evolves or devolves into for the last third. Y'lan Noel looks the part of an action hero right from the start, a first shot showing us all what he looks like without a shirt if I'm recalling correctly. He's borderline invincible by the time we get to an action finale that recalls The Raid. There are more shoot-outs than in any other 2018 movie with the exception of the Sicario sequel, and while none of the action sequences show us anything new, they work well enough.

What doesn't work is probably everything else. Characters make decisions that really make you wonder what they're thinking about. The dialogue is often really bad, and I'd contend that any dialogue that takes place outside or in the middle of the street is a plot hole. There are far too many jump scares with loud noises, a cliche I'm really bored with. The proceedings are probably unnecessarily bloody. And there's product placement for Halloween, a movie reboot I'm assuming is another upcoming Blumhouse feature.

Oh, I forgot about another fun bit of criminal activity. One guy takes advantage of the 12-hours of lawlessness by getting himself a fish-head mask and running around with a squirt gun. You could do that without as much of a risk of being shot to death any time. This guy doing it on Purge night deserves some recognition, right?

This was an odd choice for Oscar winner Marisa Tomei.