In short: The Forever Purge (2021)

This (final time, I believe) around, the Purge movies at least for half of the running time leave their more typical big city surroundings for a rural part of Texas close to El Paso. The film centres on the misadventures of Mexican (illegal) immigrant couple Adela (Ana de la Reguera) and Juan (Tenoch Huerta)  and various people they will have to – sometimes grudgingly – team up with when a heavily armed and well organized insurrection of crazy racists all around the US decides that purging is never going to end (one supposes until all brown people are dead).

Eventually, our heroes – including what’s left of Juan’s former white employers so irony alarm – will have to try and flee to Mexico, before the border closes.

Well, you certainly can’t say that Everardo Valerio Gout’s entry in the never-ending Purge series is quite as lacking in ambition as the – still somewhat entertaining – First Purge movie was. This one at least tries to say something new via the lessons learned of Trumpism and its consequences about what happens when the politics of resentment inevitably slither out of control of the people who once tried to wield them as a weapon. There’s actually some interesting, thoughtful for a pulp politics exploitation movie, subtext about class and race hidden here, the filmmakers clearly making the point that most of the violence in their series happens between people whose socio-economic status should make them allies (in the dictionary sense of the word) rather than enemies.

The problem here is that keeping the usual Purge movie structure centring on a small group of people trying to survive an onslaught of crazy people isn’t a terrible effective way to talk about the film’s bigger concerns. While its focus on characters on the margins of politics and history is perfectly admirable and in keeping with the film’s politics, it also gets in the way of it making the points it attempts to make as clearly as it should. Because we get to see only newsflash snatches of the big picture, we never actually get to see it as anything but a background to the action, instead of it being explored through the action.

Speaking of the action, as an exploitation action movie, The Forever Purge is pretty decent. It lacks the John Carpenter poise of the second Purge film as well as the craziness of the third one, trying to find a middle ground where thematically masked groups of bad guys are still there and accounted for but never get too silly or weird. Which does work as far as it goes, but leaves the action more the bread and butter kind of exciting, never quite selling it as shocking or as bizarre. It’s still perfectly watchable, and certainly trying to not be redundant as a part of its series of films, so I do hold the thumbs of two film critics of your choice up for it.