I’ve come around on “The Purge” movies in 2018. What I once thought of as goofy exploitation movies, are now goofy exploitation movies with a point. They’re exploitation we need right now, they’re kind of angry diatribes about society that I’ve come to respect. Stuff about the white privileged banking off of the purge, the purge becoming an industry on to itself, “The Purge” posing as an alternate universe tale where the female candidate for president reigned supreme, and now where “The First Purge” begins as an “experiment.”
“The First Purge” has a lot of cheese and silliness injected but it’s one of the most focused entries of the series to date. It’s a pretty balls to the wall actioner about a government bred program with its own ulterior motives that we slowly come to explore by the time the film comes to its third chapter. “The First Purge” is in a very, very near future in Staten Island, New York, where crime and poverty are up and the NFFA have deemed it a very bold but potentially successful idea to instill a mandatory annual night where nothing is against the law. On the surface it seems like something of a radical method of giving society a means of relinquishing their aggression. But when we open on the new film, representatives for the Purge experiment are interviewing potential prospects for the impending night.
Not only are they recruiting people to stay the course for the First Purge, but they’re offering them monetary rewards that blatantly prey on their poverty, and leave them with a damned if they do, damned if they don’t position. Much of “The First Purge” wears its message on its sleeve, examining an urban landscape primarily dominated by minorities of African American and Hispanic descent. Before long, despite protests, the NFFA stages the first purge, and soon the predators creep out of the darkness. Events become even more inexplicable when white supremacists and KKK members start preying on various civilians, which leaves our main characters pushed in to the middle of a horrendous situation they hoped to ride out.
“The First Purge” resembles a lot of “Das Experiment” and “Wag the Dog,” where the engineers of this experiment find that it begins to work too well. And what becomes something of a cleansing social experiment, transforms in to a cleansing of race and the lower class. Gerard McMurray’s direction is stellar with the continued realization of “The Purge” universe becoming so much more volatile and fascinating to delve in to. “The Purge” began as something of a dystopian horror film that’s been pushed further and further in to our current social and class climate where we’re even more divided than ever. I wish we didn’t have to contend with the goofy mid-credits promo for the upcoming TV series, but thankfully “The Purge” survives as the best installment of the franchise to date, with powerful social commentary.