Ahh… The Purge.
A yearly, government-sanctioned 12-hour murder free-for-all that somehow fixed unemployment, crime, and the economy all at once. Yeah… the core premise of this entire franchise is pants-on-retarded. Three years earlier, the original The Purge debuted to mostly poor reviews. The biggest complaints were the poorly explained premise played completely straight in a bottle-movie format, and the only glowing recommendation most people could muster was Adelaide Kane in a short skirt. A year later the franchise course-corrected hard with The Purge: Anarchy. They took their crazy idea out into the open world and actually showed what happens during those 12 hours of legal murder and dancing in the streets. Throw in the ass-kicking charisma of Frank Grillo playing basically The Punisher without the Marvel copyright, and suddenly you had a much-improved, genuinely entertaining sequels
Two years after that we got the third installment: The Purge: Election Year. The film picks up two years after Anarchy. Frank Grillo returns as Leo Barnes (not Frank Castle, though the vibe is identical), now working security detail for presidential candidate Senator Charlie Roan (Elizabeth Mitchell). Charlie is running against a cartoonishly psychotic right-wing pastor who feels like a fever-dream mashup of every Hollywood stereotype of a Trump-supporting Christian. There’s also another female candidate who appears in exactly one shot and is never mentioned again. Charlie’s entire family was slaughtered during a past Purge, so she has dedicated her life to politics with the sole goal of ending the deadly tradition forever. This is the exact moment the movie stops making sense and starts repeating every mistake the first film made.
If you are a right-winger, a white guy over 40, or someone who identifies as Christian, you may have a problem with this movie. It goes out of its way to paint people like you as the psychotic, racist extremists that Hollywood elites clearly believe you are. When the white Christian antagonist teams up with the sexist 1% Illuminati of Washington to kidnap the female senator, drag her to a church, and try to murder her “in the name of God” while hiring Neo-Nazi hitmen to finish the job, the only way the filmmakers could have been less subtle is if Donald Trump himself showed up on screen and ordered everyone to kill all the brown people to Make America Great Again. They spend so much time grinding their classist political axe that they completely lose the one thing that made people like Anarchy in the first place: watching a group of decent people wander into a lawless city and try to survive a night full of murderous psychopaths.
The dialogue is terrible. Literally every character talks like they wandered out of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. The main subplot revolves around a deli-store owner named Joe Dixon (Mykelti Williamson). Joe is basically Danny Glover in every movie he’s made since Lethal Weapon 2—an old Black man who is “too old for this shit” and speaks almost exclusively in lines ripped straight from 1970s blaxploitation flicks. His partner is a Mexican immigrant named Marcos whose sole purpose in the film is to remind the audience that Mexico is basically the Purge 24/7. After the evil insurance company (shakes fist) screws Joe over the day before the Purge by jacking up his rates, the two of them try to defend their store from a pack of teenage girls who murder people for 75-cent chocolate bars while blasting painful Miley Cyrus tracks.I’ll give the actors some credit—they clearly know this might be their last major Hollywood paycheck, so at least they’re swinging for the fences. For a movie where our heroes spend a huge chunk of the runtime fleeing through the city while being hunted by Neo-Nazis and government death squads, Election Year feels largely tensionless.
There is almost no situation the main characters can’t plot-armor their way out of. The rules supposedly say that everyone—including government officials—is fair game during the Purge, yet the only important person who actually dies is the one designated “father figure” character, because of course he does.If pure violence is what you’re after, Election Year doesn’t disappoint. Chainsaws, shotguns, improvised weapons, and creative kills are all on the menu. Frank Grillo, who was the shining star of the previous film, is somewhat limited in his ass-kicking this time around, but the cinematography remains solid and it’s still fun to watch the production team invent new ways to turn killers into walking Picassos of gore. The problem is that a soulless action-horror movie trying this hard to make a heavy-handed political statement doesn’t just hurt the sense of realism—it actively drains the fun out of the action that audiences showed up for.The Purge: Election Year closes the door on what could have been a solid, if ridiculous, trilogy.
Instead it turns the series into a pair of clunkers with one genuine gem stuck in the middle. The concept was always stupid, but when the movies leaned into pure survival chaos they worked. The second they decided to climb on a soapbox and lecture half the country, the whole thing collapsed under its own pretension.
1/5
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