The Purge franchise is, without a doubt, one of the most interesting horror mainstays of this particular era of genre filmmaking, as its out-and-out blunt-force criticism of the faults in at the heart of American life became more and more potent the more that life began to reflect the bizarro world depicted on screen. Sure, we might not have been setting aside whole nights where crime would be totally legal and delighting in human sacrifice, but it was hard not to watch as the series developed an outright political consciousness beyond its original stated aims. It made for a few flawed-yet-fascinating films, including Gerard McMurray’sThe First Purge, which, for my money, is one of the best horror sequels (or prequels!) of the decade. But The Forever Purge, the “final” installment of the franchise, directed by TV mainstay Everardo Gout and penned by series creator James DeMonaco, is about a real whiff of a conclusion. It’s not, say, Jaws: The Revenge, but it does limp to the finish, abandoning the heart of the series for the comforts of assured catastrophe.
You might remember that the New Founding Fathers Party, the group responsible for instating the Purge, were voted out of power a few films back, but don’t worry, as an exposition-heavy montage early on tells you that they regained it and reimposed Purge Night, promptly erasing all of Frank Grillo’s hard work in a single bit of narration. This time, we’re in Texas, where, after a relatively uneventful Purge Night in a small town, the Purgers don’t stop after the sirens go off the next morning. This forces an unlikely alliance between a wealthy white couple (Josh Lucas and Cassidy Freeman) and a pair of migrants (Tenoch Huerta and Ana de la Reguera) who fled Mexico to escape cartel violence and also worked for the couple before Americans got Forever Purge fever. It’s announced that, in response to the violence, the Mexican and Canadian governments have ordered that their borders be opened to American refugees (if you thought of The Day After Tomorrow when that was shown in the film’s trailer, you aren’t alone), so our heroes have to venture across the burning state in order to make it out before the walls literally close in on them.
Unlike The First Purge, there’s a surprising amount of restraint in Gout’s handling of DeMonaco’s provocations, and it’s an approach that feels at odds with the material: when you’re depicting the collapse of the country into violent anarchy, the worst possible way to come at that is generically. Whereas his predecessor immersed himself in the ugliness of Trump-era American racism, filtered through the lens of American exploitation cinema, in touches large and small (Y’lan Noel choking the life out of a mercenary in a blackface mask will, for me, at least stand out as one of the most memorable images of this era of populist cinema) Gout offers up no such rejoinder or escalation in rhetoric or his visuals. The closest he comes are a group of skull-faced cowboys looking to take theirs from the wealthy family that they’re employed by, but they’re dispensed with quickly and never seen again. It’s a shame, given their explicit identification with a kind of leftist class-conscious, but it’s perhaps to be expected, as the Purge franchise has always favored the anonymous mercenary instead of those that they draw you in with. Moreover, it exposes faults and flaws that have always been in the series’ construction — as usual, CGI blood splatter dominates the impact-less action, but without the strong work behind the scenes, it becomes more of an issue than ever before.
Yet this mildness isn’t a wholly bad issue if it’s supported by strong filmmaking, and that’s what’s specifically disappointing here about The Forever Purge. You have the perfect set-up for a neo-western and a number of ways you could tackle it — you could go full faux-Leone at points or emulate Eastwood, but the series’ imagination feels tapped out at this point, and Gout doesn’t challenge that. More than any other film in this series, this installment feels like an episode of The Walking Dead: characters running through alleys in burned-out cities, occasionally stopping to hash out differences before heading to another setpiece. There are few memorable moments, with one or two scenes that might have stood muster in previous installments — a crazed skinhead in the back of a police van identifying guns by the sound of shots ringing out, a pair of bunny-masked murderers trapping our heroine in a Saw-like trap involving a cattle gun — but the blandness conceals everything else. I don’t mean to suggest that this is Gout’s fault entirely, as DeMonaco shares some of the blame for why this is just so dull and lifeless: it feels as if he wrote himself into a corner in Election Year by ending Purge Night, and summoned the last vestiges of his creative energies in order to make a prequel that wasn’t total dogshit. That gets to the heart of the issue here: it is inherently boring to watch the collapse of this particular America because it steps over what specifically makes the franchise thematically interesting.
While it may seem like the Purge movies are trying to spook us with a nihilist libertarian fantasy of having the freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want for a single night and its consequences, in my view, it’s a greater metaphor for the functioning of society itself and the countless cruelties we accept as natural and normal thanks to their state-sponsored status. It’s one of the reasons that the first Purge film is, for all of its many, many faults, vaguely chilling still: everyone accepts this night as a just solution to the bevy of issues that plague our nation, as the folks in Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” did. As the sequels went on, DeMonaco climbed the ladder of power with each installment, taking us further and further into the world, until we were witnessing the birth of Purge Night alongside the scientist who invented it, and now we’re back to street level, watching the world fall apart because the fascists couldn’t keep a tight leash on their bloodthirsty followers. This collapse implies a definite moral arc and resolution which can be rationalized, which is cathartic in its own way: An unjust nation collapses, a just one emerges or something worse does, and we understand it and explain it away with the benefit of hindsight. I think that The Forever Purge lets viewers, who indulged in their dark desires and worst impulses in the previous installments while also indicting them, off the hook in a way that the other films in the franchise didn’t, and it’s a goddamn shame that it does