The Forever Purge (2021)

 Score: 4 / 5

They say it'll be the last entry in the franchise, but we have serious doubts about that.

Finally, we get the Purge movie that the series has been leading up to, a pot of racial and class warfare boiling over into chaos. The bitter memory of an Ethan Hawke-led home invasion yawner is long gone, thankfully, and the threads of racist genocidal design spin together into a thick cord of violence snapping at the heels of the last presidential administration. We've hopped from downtown Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., and Staten Island in the last few movies, and now we're plopped right at the border with Mexico. The heat only exacerbates the overt political tensions, and the violence is appropriately more visceral and alarming than we've yet seen in this series.

Set after the events of Election Year (still my favorite in the series, but now barely), which saw the ultraconservative New Founding Fathers of America (NFFA) politically overthrown, we now move to rural south. As Texas was one of the last places to learn about the abolition of slaves, it is now one of the last holdouts of violent "forever Purgers," in the midst of rebelling against the end of their annual bloodbath. Determined to reinstate the Purge night, they also want it to be continuous, a means of life for the purpose of death, so that they may exterminate minority groups, immigrants, and basically anyone who isn't white (and/or other identifiers left implicit). To be fair, there is also at least one depiction of a radical left-wing group seeking class reduction by slaughtering the one-percenters, but it feels empty if not rational, mostly because the preceding installments have established the one-percenters as the driving force of the NFFA. And then, as we've seen all along, there are regular psychos and criminals and wannabe rebels who just want an excuse to behave badly and/or watch the world burn. But there is a definite focus regarding the evildoers in this installment.

Specifically, The Forever Purge takes as its story the journey of several Mexican immigrants who have come to the U.S. escaping cartel violence. Ana de la Reguera and Tenoch Huerta (both are acting on levels this franchise does not deserve) lead the film as a couple who work in a meatpacking plant and a cowboy, respectively. It's the sort of labor that wealthy, educated white folk don't like to sully their hands with, and so each of them is shown early on battling racism from angry, disenfranchised white folks working alongside them. It's hard to imagine life being so bad back home that they'd move to a country in which Nativists are actively seeking dystopian control, but then again... look at the last four years of our real political landscape! This movie anchors its horror in remarkably arresting specifics, notably a border wall that becomes a barrier for traffic going both ways, rather than just one. During the riots and urban warfare, the Mexican president offers sanctuary for any U.S. citizen wanting to flee the sudden uprisings in all fifty states; it's a wickedly brilliant moment on the filmmakers' behalf, to so quickly flip real-life conservative headlines about Mexican immigration.

As the heroes escape an initial onslaught brought on by vengeful farmhands and racist laborers in town, they find help from an unlikely source: Will Patton, playing a wealthy white ranch owner who is socially and politically liberal. Helpful as he is, he quickly becomes a target of the Purgers, and the heroes go on the run, aided by his son, played by Josh Lucas doing his usual shtick of being handsome and creepy at the same time. Here playing a seemingly one-note racist (not hateful, but just wanting people to stick with their own kind, not mix), the film loosely considers that he's really not all bad, and certainly better than the "let's kill 'em all" bands of neo-Nazis. After all, he's actually helping the brown people he's been foisted upon, whereas one street over we hear masked cowboys shooting people who don't speak English while entire buildings are ablaze behind them.

James DeMonaco, creator of the series and writer of this one, teams well with Mexican-American director Everardo Gout to make this entry grounded in a more realistic reality than we've yet seen from the franchise. Importantly, it also has the most urgent messages about real life than we've yet heard, with the possible exception of The First Purge, although that was less thematically focused and more interested in a "decent people trying to survive an impossible situation" story. And for most of the movies so far, that method has worked to bring in audiences of a different political mindset and, hopefully, show them the error of their ways. I suspect, though, it's been mostly carnage-porn for those demographics, rather than the suggestive cautionary tale its liberal audiences immediately recognized. This movie does not even try to disguise its intentions, its design, or its critique of America right now, and I loved that about it.

I did not, however, love its final act. Despite some virtuoso filmmaking -- including at least one Children of Men or Atonement-style long take in war-torn streets -- the film chooses a safe way out at the end. Maybe it's a balm for the nation, maybe a desire to let entertainment and sentiment win over hatred and violence. But the series is firmly within the horror genre, and its tendency toward happy (or, at least, not dismal) endings makes for a weak sendoff each time. This time, the daring messages fizzle out into a weak sort of "we're all in this together" whimper at the end, as the characters come together in a refugee camp in Mexico, aiming to get along in a new world, once the NFFA is disbanded and the U.S. is all but destroyed.

Because this is apparently the end of the series -- again, we'll believe that when we see it -- permit me a moment of retrospection. I really do like the Purge movies, and DeMonaco was very clever in complicating it with each new story. While the first is by far my least favorite, each entry not only develops the world he created but also draws from other subgenres of horror. In this way, he has effectively created a story not just about his fiction but about our reality, sharply pitting his ideas against current events in our sociopolitical timeline. More brilliantly, in this reviewer's mind, he has created a series that works best by similarly mapping trends in modern horror sensibilities. What started as an overly simplistic home invasion thriller has become a dumpster fire about American paranoia and class warfare. The first was about a white family's fear when a black man enters their home; the last is about a Mexican family fleeing the horrors of nativist violence. The series has always been about the love/lust Americans have for violence, and how that manifests in class, race, and exploitation. But by overtly ritualizing that violence, turning it into a spectacle and even, I'd argue, a campy catharsis, DeMonaco has shown us the genesis, the truth, and the result of our love of violence. That's an amazing legacy, even if the movies themselves aren't everyone's cuppa.