This weekend, The Purge enjoyed its third major success with Election Year, the latest film in the shockingly successful franchise. The series, based around a dark future in which all crime is made legal for one night out of the year, first emerged onto the scene in 2013 to mostly tepid, yet lucrative responses. The first films was a bog-standard slasher film with no thrills or surprises and a disappointingly static location and palette. Additionally, it was made worse by the complete disinterest the movie seemed to have in its own politics.
Then the great The Purge: Anarchy hit in 2014, an action thriller set against the slasher-apocalypse Purge Night that served as a walking tour of cool ideas and violent action. This latest installment adds a judicious helping of politics to the film’s central set-up, emphasizing the destructive price paid by the lower classes and minorities for the Purge and the way this night epitomizes predatory capitalism and class warfare. After all that and three major box office hits, I have to ask: what’s next for The Purge? Caution: spoilers to follow.
