Wednesday Review: The Purge: Election Year

I would pay a lot to see the look on Miley Cyrus’ face when she was told that the makers of The Purge: Election Year wanted to license Party in the U.S.A.  I nearly died laughing from the song’s use in this film.  It was the single most ridiculous scene in this series to date, and that’s really saying something.

I love this series.  I think director James DeMonaco has captured the zeitgeist of the 2010s better than any other single filmmaker.  We’re living in an age when we’re angry.  What we’re angry at is incidental.  We don’t trust our leaders, and the idea that they would actually legalize crime for 12 hours every year somehow doesn’t sound that farfetched.

My reviews of the first two films will post around the end of the year, but suffice it to say: I liked the original, but I recognize that Anarchy was a massive improvement, moving away from a Home Invasion thriller to a street-level view of the chaos.  Now, for our third installment, we get a Political Thriller.

While I may reevaluate this later, I currently consider Election Year to be the best film of the series to date.  The return of Frank Grillo as Leo Barnes lets us keep the heart of Anarchy, while also giving us a much stronger narrative.  Anarchy was, for the most part, a series of events that happened on Purge Night.  Election Year, on the other hand, has a real central conflict.

An Independent female Senator is running for President on a platform of ending the Purge through Executive Action (it shouldn’t bug me that a President can’t completely overrule a Constitutional Amendment in a movie already this silly, but it kind of does).  Rather than a traditional assassination, the New Founding Fathers decide to rewrite the rules of the Purge to remove the usual exemption for high-ranking government officials, making the Senator a target for Purge supporters.

On Purge night the Senator finds herself on the run, under the protection of Leo as her head of security, and various other supporters.  The stakes are clear, the story is exciting, and the world continues to be more and more fleshed out as we really see what the nation has come to.  I’d also say this film manages to avoid having any characters that feel redundant or unlikeable, giving it one-up on Anarchy.

While I don’t want to spoil too much (and don’t want to walk into overly awkward territory), I did notice that this film made the racial aspects of the Purge more overt.  The theme of racial tension was there in the first two films, which did show the largest number of Purge victims as minorities.  Election Year, however, actually showed White Supremacists as agents of the NFFA, and had one character make racial jokes that were probably intended to make the audience squirm a bit.  I was also surprised that the film opted to feature the Crips in one scene, rather than a fictional gang.

It’s starting to come out in the news now that this may be the final Purge film, and the ending was clearly written to make the movie a suitable finale, while leaving the possibility of more sequels up in the air.  I have a lot of respect for the fact that the studio let this take us off guard, rather than practically writing “finale” across the moon the way the Saw series did.  It was legitimately surprising when plot threads that have run through the series began to resolve themselves, and the status quo was blow to ashes, primarily because I didn’t expect anything to be resolved.

That said, I do hope there are more Purge movies.  This is a concept that has held up far better film-to-film than many other series that lasted much longer (*cough*Paranormal Activity*cough*).  It’s an idea so much fun that it’s difficult not to make a good movie from it.  It would be a real shame if we only got to enjoy it three times.