In short: The First Purge (2018)

Well, someone really wanted to see the pilot version of the Purge in the movie universe’s dystopian but practically ripped from the headlines world whose basic set-up I really don’t think is necessary to explain by now, so we got this. Cue the expected amount of heroic, poor black, characters, a couple of poor black crazy people, and the secret mercenary groups doing most of the killing you’d expect.

This might sound a bit glib, but that’s mostly because I think the Purge series has reached the point where it has said all it can say in its format and should go out in a blaze of gory optimism called, say, “The Final Purge”. This prequel as directed by Gerard McMurray and as usual written by James DeMonaco is still much superior to the eminently forgettable streaming show in the universe, putting a lot of effort into turning the characters beyond the masked villains and the evil politician into something akin to actual people. That’s of course one of the main strengths of the Purge movies as a series, positioning its protagonists in a racially and social-economically determined place but still treating them as individuals, which not only makes their fates rather more interesting – and their triumphs in the action sequences more fist-pumping – but also strengthens the film’s political arguments about the nature of poverty and racially produced poverty, and stands in effective contrast to the series' love for the grotesque and the bizarre. Basically, selling the weird elements through the quotidian ones.

Having said that, The First Purge doesn’t quite have as much of a sense for the grotesque as its predecessor, the filmmakers clearly having decided that trying to top the last film there would lead this one so far into the realm of the fantastically absurd their political arguments would be drowned out by it. They were probably right there, too, though I think the film’s losing some of its power as an exploitation film by going less insane.


Generally, the ultra-violence, as well as the moody shots of burning streets by night, really only get going in the film’s final third, and once they start, they are slightly less fun and slightly less tight than in the last two films, yet still good enough to keep a viewer interested; and I really can’t blame a film for attempting to build characters and their social sphere properly before the carnage begins.