 |
| The Purge: Election Year - A worthy entry in the franchise. |
Buy The Purge: Election Year
Written by: James DeMonaco
Directed by: James DeMonaco
Starring: Frank Grillo, Elizabeth Mitchell, Mykelti Williamson
Rated: R
My rating is simple, Watch It, It Depends, Skip it. Read my previous movie reviews!
Plot:
Sergeant Barnes (Frank Grillo) from The Purge: Anarchy is head of security for presidential candidate Charlie Roan (Elizabeth Mitchell) and it's purge night.
Verdict:
This is a solid movie, with the undertone of the film elevating this movie, as is the case with The Purge franchise. What would happen if crime were legal for twelve hours?
It improves upon The Purge: Anarchy, making a larger budget Purge movie without a scattered story. Centering this around an election is prescient, providing a bit more flair that a typical thriller/action movie.
While the first Purge movie extolled the virtues, this movie only portrays it as a bad thing.
Watch it.
Review:
I've seen all The Purge movies. I like the small focus of the first one; one house, one night, one family. The second movie tried to go bigger with more stories, but didn't succeed with the disconnected plot. Election does what the second should have.
This has a rather sadistic start, even for The Purge movies, with purgers forcing a mother to choose which of her children live. Of course, that child becomes an anti-purge activist.
I like that this takes the purge to a logical conclusion. Politicians are no longer exempt, but will also use that to kill their opponents. This movie knows exactly what it is and doesn't try to make that suspenseful. It gives us crooked politicians, an anti-purger & her bodyguard, and a man fighting the insurance company who just raised his purge rates. Game on.
The purge is a way for politicians to rid cities of the homeless, and for security and insurance companies to make money. While the first movie praised the event as an effective crime reducer, this movie never states that fact. It portrays the event as purely negative, and now the purge needs to be eliminated. I wish the movie had tried to provide hard numbers for why it should stop. I'm not against the idea, but the first movie went out of it's way to bolster the purge as beneficial. This movie argues the purge is bad, but doesn't try to rebuff the first movie's claims.
Senator Charlie Roan (Elizabeth Mitchell) is running for president on an anti-purge platform. She and her bodyguard Barnes (Frank Grillo) suspect nothing strange when it's announced high ranking politicians are no longer exempt from the purge, THE DAY BEFORE. They should have known she is the reason for removing the exemption. Not only that, but she wants to stay in her home, trying to be a woman of the people knowing full well that other politicians are prepared in real legetimate bunkers. Barnes leads the security detail and even puts a few guys outside at the door. Despite having lived through a few purges, he somehow thought they might live. Wrong!
Those guys don't argue to guard the door from inside, behind the plate steel? Even if a special ops force didn't try to breach the house, they were sure to suffer some kind of harm on purge night. They had zero protection.
How do purgers still find victims? Why don't people bunker up? Wouldn't there be a communal bunker by now? If purgers were killing other purgers, I could understand that, but this franchise makes a specific distinction that purgers wear masks and victims don't.There are a whole lot of dead unmasked people.
There are more than a few contrived details to set up the plot or make this movie more spectacle than a well thought out story I'm completely okay with that. This isn't an intricately detailed plot, it's a quick premise to set up an action movie, though I do wonder how teenage girls get glittery and bejeweled automatic weapons. Of course the shop owner only warns them when they first attack him, but that's because these girls have a brutal, complete and absolute fate later in the movie.
Still, it wouldn't be hard to make up a few facts to bolster the Senator's position and make some of the plot points more logical.
Senator Roan is targeted but Barnes is ready and they escape the special forces team, though they are now unprotected during the purge.
They escape through a hatch in the floor to a lower level. No one but Barnes knew the hatch was there. How do you miss that? Construction alone would be rather noticeable.
The movie sets up three stories that thankfully intersect quickly. The franchise keeps getting bigger, but this entry has a good story that brings the characters together. While it gets political, it's not overbearing. The question isn't whether the purge has a benefit, but how it's main use is to rid cities of the poor.
The movie has a number of big finishes. It's trying to wring too much out of the conclusion, providing heroes and martyrs when it's just not necessary. This isn't the movie that should attempt a sentimental death, and it makes a few different attempts at achieving that.
No comments:
Post a Comment