The Purge franchise was, from its inception, political agitprop masquerading as horror cinema—a distinction that became increasingly difficult to ignore as the series progressed. Yet any lingering doubts regarding its true nature ought to have been dispelled entirely by the fourth instalment, The First Purge (2018), during which its creators abandoned any pretence of objectivity, subtlety, or nuance and wore their partisan convictions proudly upon their sleeves. What had begun in 2013 as a dystopian thriller with satirical undertones—a film that trades on visceral thrills while simultaneously offering a biting commentary on American society—had by 2018 transformed into something far more brazen: an explicitly ideological manifesto that valued political point-scoring above narrative coherence or thematic sophistication.
The third film, The Purge: Election Year, had created something of a problem for its author, scriptwriter and producer James DeMonaco. It concluded with its heroine accomplishing what Hillary Clinton was supposed to do in real life—winning the United States presidential election and permanently ridding the world of evil, in this instance the dystopian regime of the New Founding Fathers of America (NFFA) and their policy based upon annual twelve-hour Purge nights when all manner of crimes are permitted and police and emergency services stand down. This instalment represented the most explicitly political entry in the franchise to date, with its blatant agitprop serving as a clear stand-in for the Republican Party as portrayed by Hollywood at the time. When reality failed to conform to this fantasy, DeMonaco faced a narrative impasse: how to continue a series whose previous chapter had promised deliverance through electoral politics, when the anticipated deliverance had failed to materialise?
DeMonaco solved this creative conundrum by setting the next instalment as a prequel, with a plot demonstrating how the Purge came into existence. Set in (what was then) an alternate 2014, the narrative depicts how the NFFA, having won power due to unemployment and serious economic problems that neither Democrats nor mainstream Republicans could resolve, introduces the Purge in the form of a pilot programme intended to take place within the relatively limited geographical area of Staten Island, New York. Citizens are presented with a choice: they may leave the island for the duration of the Purge or remain in exchange for five thousand dollars. Since many inhabitants are impoverished non-white people, they naturally opt for the latter, with some receiving promises of additional bonuses should they agree to receive cameras hidden in eye contact lenses and "participate" in the proceedings.
As the night commences, anti-Purge activist Nya Charms (Lex Scott Davis) maintains confidence that she will survive through the assistance of civic-minded neighbours. She remains unaware that her younger brother Isaiah (Joivan Wade) has agreed to "participate," motivated by a desire to settle a score with Skeletor (Rotimi Paul), an insane and violent drug dealer who had previously bullied him and who has also secretly agreed to participate. Simultaneously, Nya's former boyfriend Dmitri Cimber (Y'lan Noel), a local drug kingpin, mobilises his gang, unaware that his rivals intend to exploit the Purge as cover to eliminate him. As violence erupts across the island, Dr. May Updale (Marisa Tomei), the sociologist monitoring the experiment, observes that participation levels fall below expectations. This situation changes dramatically when mysterious attackers—well-organised and obviously military-trained—begin appearing throughout the island and slaughtering people on a massive scale.
DeMonaco's script bears the unmistakable fingerprints of the real-life result of the 2016 presidential election, which was apparently as traumatic for the producers as for the remainder of Hollywood. This is most evident in a scene wherein Nya must confront a Purger whose idea of amusement involves grabbing women by the genitals—precisely mirroring the leaked audio recording that was supposed to have cost Trump the presidency. Among the mercenaries committing genocide against black and brown people are individuals clearly speaking Russian, apparently belonging to the same nefarious force that supposedly "hacked" the 2016 election. The symbolism is hardly subtle: the film presents a conspiracy in which foreign adversaries collaborate with domestic fascists to exterminate minority populations, a narrative that serves the film's political agenda whilst straining credulity.
Whilst the film continues its habit of equating conservative flag-waving fundamentalist Christians—an obvious pre-Trump caricature of the Republican Party—with demonic villainy, the division between Good and Evil in this instalment is disturbingly drawn along racial lines. All heroes are black, including Dmitri, a ruthless crime lord whose small army terrorises the neighbourhood and who would have served as the villain in any contemporary film, but who here transforms not merely into a valiant defender of his people but also into a Rambo-esque killing machine. Meanwhile, the villains exploit the Purge to stage lynchings whilst dressed in Ku Klux Klan robes, with some even re-staging the infamous 1991 LAPD beating of Rodney King. Near the conclusion, during a climactic fight scene, Dmitri not only kills one of these antagonists but takes considerable time to remove his mask; upon seeing that his victim is white, he expresses clear disgust that someone with such a face dared enter his neighbourhood. The racial essentialism on display is remarkable—virtue and villainy are determined entirely by melanin content.
The action sequences near the conclusion, despite taking place in darkness which, as with so many instances of modern cinema, renders the gore less visible and the film less problematic for MPAA censors, are relatively solid. Y'lan Noel proves quite competent as an action hero, despite his never-explained ability to overcome better trained, more numerous, and better equipped adversaries even after his men have been decimated by drones. The film concludes on a hopeful note, with the protagonists leading survivors in the aftermath of the Purge and promising that the resistance shall continue—an ending that suggests further instalments whilst providing the requisite emotional uplift for the audience.
Yet, for all its technical competence and performative earnestness, the film reveals itself as remarkably shallow upon closer examination. The reasoning behind the NFFA's decision to pursue this experiment and establish the Purge is never convincingly explained; the economic and social logic that would drive a government to sanction mass murder remains frustratingly vague. More troubling still is a conceptual flaw that the first film never possessed. By poisoning the premise with cheap dystopian fiction clichés and transforming a simple action horror into a conspiracy thriller, DeMonaco robbed the Purge of what truly made it frightening—the very real and historically confirmed phenomenon of seemingly decent ordinary people, individuals whom most of us might encounter any day, committing inexplicably evil acts when granted opportunity. The original 2013 film suggested that beneath the veneer of civilisation, we are all just waiting for permission to be beasts—a genuinely disturbing proposition rooted in historical reality, from the Holocaust to the Stanford prison experiment.
The script here directly contradicts this premise and instead advances the comforting fiction that people are inherently decent and will not Purge unless pushed to do so by evil governments and their mercenary proxies. In essence, The First Purge, for the sake of cheap daily politics, absolves the actual perpetrators of atrocities like Auschwitz and Rwanda of any genuine responsibility, claiming instead that they were merely manipulated and coerced by a few "rotten apples" in high places. This is not merely a betrayal of the franchise's original concept; it is a moral abdication that sanitises human nature to serve a partisan narrative. Where the 2013 original understood that horror lies in the recognition of our own capacity for evil, the 2018 prequel insists that evil is external, foreign, and conveniently wearing a white face.
RATING: 2/10 (-)
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