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Purge Night has never been subtle.
Maybe the series started with a small-scale home invasion story where a rich, white couple is terrorized by sadistic masked assailants during the federally sanctioned crime spree. But in The Forever Purge, our latest plunge into series creator James DeMonaco's cynical vision of real American carnage, all vestiges of coyness are gone. The masks are off, the violence is happening in broad daylight, and the primary targets, wouldn't you know it, are people of color.
DeMonaco's script imagines the world that came after The Purge: Election Year(2016), which ended with the New Founding Fathers of America (NFFA), the political party responsible for Purge Night, getting tossed out of power. It didn't last long. Now back in the White House, the NFFA immediately reinstitutes America's yearly festival of bloodletting.
The Forever Purgeisn't about the NFFA anymore, though. Really, it's about the monster that has always lurked deep in the core of America's dark heart. Purge Night unleashed that monster, but the annual event's temporary shutdown ushered in a new era with its eventual return: the Ever After Purge.
The monster, of course, is racism. And so the Ever After Purge, a sort of loosely organized rebellion in which America's millions upon millions of violence-craving racists have mutually agreed in secret to keep Purge Night going even after the sirens wail at dawn, is born. It's not Purge Night anymore. It's not even thePurge, conceptually. The Forever Purgeis simply the start of America's long-brewing racist civil war.
Our setting this time is, fittingly, Texas border communities. The story's central Purge-escapers are a pair of Mexican immigrant farmhands, T.T. (Alejandro Edda) and Juan (Tenoch Heurta), plus Juan's wife Adela (Ana de la Reguera), and the small family of white ranchers — Dylan (Josh Lucas), his wife Emma (Cassidy Freeman), and his sister Harper (Leven Rambin) — that the two farmhands work for.
The Forever Purge goes further than any other Purge in revealing the naked heart of the series.
The unlikely union between Dylan, who's a bit of a racist himself, and his workers is formed out of necessity when Purge Night doesn't end. The group finds themselves on the run together and fighting to reach the border, which Mexico (and Canada) opens up to all comers for just six hours once the Ever After Purge kicks off, giving violence-averse U.S. citizens a chance to escape.
If you're looking for a deep and revealing character-driven story, this ain't it. Adela and Juan quickly emerge alongside Dylan as the key figures, but The Forever Purgedoesn't spend a whole lot of time peeling away their layers. Adela's rough upbringing in Mexico makes her more of a fighter than many would assume at first glance, Juan is a natural cowboy at heart, and Dylan's "we should all just stick with our own" strain of racism is rooted in ignorance rather than violent impulses.
They're predictable characters with predictable arcs, and everything we need to know about them is made clear in the opening half hour (that goes for the whole ensemble). They spend the rest of the movie riffing on their simple, broadly painted archetypes during the quiet moments, and doing their best to look engaged through a string of mostly plodding action sequences.
Director Everardo Gout has a decent enough handle on the emotional beats a Purge story is supposed to hit, but the action in this movie lacks energy. When the group is left without a vehicle in the war-torn streets of El Paso, what should be a tense and jump scare-fraught advance through a series of dark alleys ends up feeling more like a leisurely stroll (sure, with guns and the odd murder).
It's not even the daylight factor that's the problem; our El Paso scenario, for example, unfolds at night. The arrival of sunlit mayhem borders on being a refreshing shift for the series, even. The action just isn't all that exciting. Some of the issue is framing, with scenes often shot too wide for startling surprises to emerge from just out of view.
It's more than that, though. The actors don't really sell it, with the veryobviously low-budget sprays of blood, a series signature at this point, further undermined by performances that feel distant and removed from the terror of the moment. The stage combat is also terribly unconvincing and even amateurish at times, with a punch not connecting here or there and a generally absent feeling of impact after even the heaviest blows.
Worst of all though is an overriding tendency toward cheesy and overwrought filmmaking. When the camera lingers on a key character's face just after he's shot in the head, presumably to heighten the impact of the loss, it feels like a parody of an emotional moment instead. But the Purge movies haven't ever traded in self-parody before, so we have to assume it's a serious effort with unserious results.
Credit: universal picturesFor a series that's been many things over the years, but The Forever Purgesteps into surprising new territory: It's just kinda boring. The social relevance of the overarching schtick is still engaging as a thought experiment, but the moment-to-moment viscerality of an ongoing story that interrogates our most vile, animal impulses as humans is strangely absent now.
That's not to say The Forever Purgelacks all punch. In stripping off the masks and revealing the Purge Night activities for what they've always been — a brutalization of the 99% as a whole — this latest chapter gives us new ideas to think about and new American demons to fear.
Frequent references to the very real post-2016 United States keep us anchored: a "bad hombres" here, a lingering shot of the towering border wall there. When a swastika-tattooed criminal smiles gleefully as he identifies the model of each firearm he hears by its report, we recognize the substance of the moment. "That is American music, motherfucker," he remarks. And we get it.
That topicality is what makes these Purge stories work, and The Forever Purgegoes further than any other in revealing the naked heart of the series. It's nothing surprising, and it's barely even entertaining as we sit here not six full months removed from an actual attack on American democracy.
But still...it's impossible to look away. The Forever Purgecasts the same captivating spell as its predecessors, dishing out a cynical-yet-horrifically-believable tale of good, old American ultraviolence. The masks are off, the racists are on, and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free are streaming across the border, creating a new generation of American Dreamers.
The Purge is many things, but like I said: It's never been subtle.
The Forever Purgeis in theaters now.