The Purge: Election Year introduces Senator Charlie Roan (Elizabeth Mitchell), a presidential candidate running on a platform of ending the annual Purge. After the scandals revealed in the last movie, she's becoming a real contender in the race. The New Founding Fathers decide to use the latest Purge as a means of eliminating all threats to their regime. Senator Roan is betrayed from within, but just manages to escape capture thanks to her bodyguard Leo (Frank Grillo). The two are forced to wander the streets of Washington DC on the most dangerous night of the year, hoping to get to safety.
In its third installment, this franchise, which has just hovered aimlessly around social relevance, gets overtly political. And it isn't the most comfortable fit. It is on shaky ideological ground at best, the concept itself requiring an unreasonable amount of suspension of disbelief to really work. At worst, the film could be seen as hypocritical, railing against the use violence while reveling in the visceral pleasures that come from depicting such lurid material. The movie is best received as a dumb action thriller. Its attempts at anything greater fall horribly short of anything worth considering.
The Purge itself as a narrative continues to strain credulity. The more the movie reveals about the world in which this all takes place, the harder it is to buy into how any of it is happening. For the film to function, one has to pretty much buy into the ideology that the film's ostensible villains are espousing: that people are inherently violent, and that there is something to be gained from allowing them to act on their darkest impulses. And here is where the film gets pretty muddled. Its heroes represent the opposite of that thinking, and we're supposed to think they're right even when everything in the film stands in direct contrast to that idea.
Putting questions of plausibility aside, the film does a fair enough job of functioning as a basic action thriller. The direction works well enough, and the acting is full of flavor. There is danger at every corner, and the main characters never really know if they can trust anyone. There are a couple of effective jump scares that really highlight the danger that the characters are in. There is just the hitch of the contrivance that the bad guys want to capture the Senator alive, but for the most part, the film's plot chugs along efficiently, with regular bursts of sudden violence keeping the energy up.
But taken within the context of what the film is trying to say, the effective violence might actually be a problem. It feels more than a tad hypocritical for the film to speak so strongly against the use of violence to solve problems while delivering a story where violence is used to solve problems. The film ends up implying that there is a righteous kind of violence; that it is, in the end, necessary for some people to harm others in the name of a greater cause. And that makes them different from the film's villains, when all is said and done.
The Purge: Election Year is problematic to say the least. It is usually a good thing for a film to invite further contemplation, to use it elements to build to a greater theme that says something about present day society. But this film just doesn't stand up to further thought. Its politics are confused at best, and maybe a little dangerous at worst. Even in this current environment of extreme violence all around the world, within the context in which the movie is best poised to comment, the film struggles to find relevance, its ideas far too underdeveloped to make any meaningful statement.
My Rating:
