In every way, Election Year feels like the destination The Purge has been headed toward—but its topical theme also highlights the series’ biggest shortcoming.
Another year, another Purge. With each new installment, this horror franchise has given its audience deeper and deeper glimpses at a dystopian society that grants its citizens an annual 12-hour carte blanche to commit any and all crimes, including murder. The more Purges we watch, the more we see of the institutions behind this policy—and the people fighting against it. And with each film, the parallels and references to the real world get more explicit.
Election Year, which comes out Friday, feels like a natural end point in that progression: the movie goes all-in and gives us a firsthand look at the government behind the gruesome tradition we’ve come to know and voyeuristically love. It may have been best, though, to keep those behind-the-scenes mechanics hidden.
The election year is 2025—three years after the events of The Purge, and two years after the events of The Purge: Anarchy. This round, we’re following a senator named Charlie Roan (Elizabeth Mitchell), who wants to overturn the establishment and end the Purge for good. The nation’s current leadership, the New Founding Fathers of America, is a markedly white, shriveled, moneyed crowd—and they don’t like the young, blonde senator at all. Naturally, they decide to take her out using this year’s Purge.
Enter Leo Barnes (Frank Grillo), the pompadour-sporting badass from The Purge: Anarchy. In this installment, he’s gone full-on good guy as the head of Charlie’s security detail.
As Leo and Charlie flee from the N.F.F.A.’s hit squad, they find allies: a deli owner named Joe (played by the ineffably charismatic Mykelti Williamson), his most trusted employee Marcos (Joseph Julian Soria), and his badass surrogate daughter Laney (Betty Gabriel). If we’re being real, it’s Joe and company you’ll really be rooting for—partially because the political turmoil that underpins the film makes its ultimate message difficult to read.
The Purge movies have always thrived on subtext—none of which is particularly subtle. When the series’s first installment came out in 2013, it was clearly trying to say something about gun culture—although, if we’re being honest, it was hard to say exactly what. Some right-wing viewers took the movie to be a direct shot at the Tea Party and the N.R.A. WhileThe Purge strongly suggests the class tensions underpinning this world, The Purge: Anarchyelaborates on them more clearly, with scenes like one in which wealthy people gather in an auction to bid on poor people to hunt down for sport.
The Purge: Election Year gives us an even broader look at this dystopia, making direct, occasionally heavy-handed references to a real-world election season that’s turned out far worse than writer-director James DeMonaco ever could have imagined.
The parallels are pretty clear. No, there’s no specific Donald Trump stand-in—but the N.F.F.A. evokes the hatefulness, whiteness, and wealth with which Trump has associated himself. Members of its hired hit squad wear patches including the Confederate flag and, most blatantly, one that simply says “White Power.” Though Roan is not really a stand-in forHillary Clinton, her detractors’ blatant misogyny puts to shame the sexism Clinton has faced. (In his first breath on-screen, leader Caleb Warrens calls her a cunt.) Marcos is an undocumented immigrant who recently became legal. And perhaps most important, we’re repeatedly told that the Purge financially benefits the N.R.A. and insurance companies—that it’s “legalized murder.”
But it’s also hard to decide how seriously we’re meant to take all of this.
The Purge has often been described as a B-thriller at heart, and that’s an apt line to draw: these movies are captivating, but it’s best not to think too hard about the story holding them all together. (For instance: In a nation that’s apparently rife with class issues, why is everyone committing murder instead of theft?)
And in the latest film, the election serves as a thankfully lean frame story—but even occasional allusions to it will yank viewers out of the bedlam, more than they typically would while watching a Purge movie. The movie forced me to become the type of wet blanket I hate. I started wondering how, exactly, this government could possibly work—what exact role the New Founding Fathers of America play, alongside traditional bodies like the Senate.
The message, too, gets muddled the longer you think about it, once you start thinking about it at all: Are we supposed to just laugh at this movie, or is it trying to convey a real moral? And if so, what could that moral be? That gun culture is a scourge, but guns themselves are indispensable when the world around you is a nightmare? That teenagers are never to be trusted in an apocalypse? That insurance companies are the worst? (Many would say they knew that last one already.)
The bottom line, of course, is that these are horror movies. Only a wet blanket fixates on minor details like implausibility and mixed messages when the on-screen spectacle is a pulpy delight—which the Purge movies, especially Anarchy and Election Year, certainly have been.
There’s no shortage of campy carnage in Election Year, either. The Lincoln Memorial is defaced with letters spelling P-U-R-G-E across its columns, and cars zoom down the street with writhing people tied down to the hood like something out of Mad Max. Blood-soaked teenage girls skip in circles, arms linked, clad in fishnets and tutus, armed with rhinestone-encrusted assault rifles. Also, two words: back-alley guillotine.
The more the Purge movies tether themselves to what’s going on in the real world, the more questions they prod us to ask about what they’re doing and what they want to mean.
But personally, I’d rather just enjoy the carnage.
Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/07/the-purge-election-year-review
