There’s a great deal of power to financially successful franchise that can lower its own bar: look no further than the “Alvin and the Chipmunks” movies and their squeakquels. Also, see the “Purge” series. Their charm in depicting the history of a national holiday where crime is legal for 12 hours has been fueled by cheap politics and easy commentary targets, flattening the tense air of a home invasion in the original movie to feature-length, monotonous free-for-alls. But whether the previous movies have ultimately said anything or not, they have whipped up some exploitative chutzpah by jamming their finger inside the gory, gaping wounds of American values.
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Now we have director Everardo Valerio Gout’s “The Forever Purge,” which is more of a middle finger to the audience. How else to feel about how this lazy blockbuster sequel looks like a cheap TV movie and is easily the worst one yet? Instead of getting bigger with this fifth installment that takes down what little decorum there is to purging, it grossly cuts any corners it can. It’s purported to be the final in the series, and at the very least, it affirms that the “Purge” concept has officially killed its own gratuitous thrills.
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This Purge concerns America’s hatred of immigrants from Mexico. Ana de La Reguera (“Army of the Dead”) plays Adela, a woman who sneaks across the border from Mexico, along with her husband Juan (Tenoch Huerta, “Narcos: Mexico”). They survive their first purge night, hiding with immigrants and other people who cannot afford to barricade their homes at night, as the holidays 12 hours wreak generic savagery across people (which we see in throwaway, ho-hum security footage). It’s the next morning that the forever purgers roll into town, hunting people like Adela, declaring how they want to purify the nation.
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But the larger plot of “The Forever Purge” is about how a rich white family, the Tuckers, come to identify with the experience of feeling hunted and second class. Franchise creator and “Forever Purge” writer James DeMonaco had a very inspired day when he realized the idea for The Purge; he clearly did not have the same spark when he wrote these characters that are humanized because a woman named Cassie (Cassidy Freeman) is pregnant. Meanwhile, her husband Tucker (Josh Lucas) needs to get past his bias against the Mexicans he employs at the family ranch, especially after employee Juan and his friend T.T. (Alejandro Edda) end up saving their asses when armed forever Purgers come for the Tuckers. There’s no reason to care for the Tuckers except that a future baby is involved, and yet these are the most developed beings in DeMonaco’s script. It’s almost a bizarre joke that we’re stuck with them for the rest of the film, even though their most exciting facet is that Will Patton plays the family’s wise patriarch.
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These upper-class citizens become a cheap way for the script to humanize the immigrants then, especially as everyone works together to fend off forever purgers on their way to Mexico, where the border is open for only six hours. There’s a small layer of hero mythology placed on Adela and Juan, she with her particular set of gun skills from an initially mysterious background, and he with the assured footing of an all-American cowboy. “The Forever Purge” treats these qualities as superpowers when the forever purgers start to attack them with an army’s precision, and the victory of seeing them kick ass feels minor when these humans are written with such shorthand.
Much of “The Forever Purge” mixes its slick digital cinematography with dull Texas daylight for some inexplicable reason. It doesn’t do the proposed horror any favors, especially when it needs shadow and mystery for its threats of unpredictable violence, and it makes the film’s shoot-outs and fights seem all the more grit-less and clunky. A scene made of long takes, in which our heroes duck and run through a war-torn El Paso, looks almost like a first-person YouTube video tour through the Universal backlot on explosion night. There’s little effort to obscure how stagey everything looks, and the cinematography affirms how rinky-dink the overall movie is.
“The Forever Purge” just does not have the vital bogeyman factor that helps these movies go from one unpredictable action with an armed zealot to the next. In a vain attempt to raise the horror quotient, Gout relies on far too many fake psyche-outs for jump scares, like one involving a toy bat that’s in a movie that’s too disastrous for the moment to be sarcastic or playful. The scary inhumanity of the series has been turned into gruel, and if the movies were not numbing already from their exploitation qualities, it certainly happens here by being so unsurprising, so automatic, so uninspired in how chaos reigns. DeMonaco’s new idea for a “forever Purge” is intriguing—to consider how much civility comes from the 12-hour limit—but it’s wasted by a dead first act that lumbers through one violent night. In contrast, the idea of this radical pro-Purge party becomes faceless and generic through non-scary scenes. It’s not even until about an hour in this film that we get a face to associate as the lead force of white evil, and it only registers as conceptually sinister.
The series has gained power from presenting things as they are, but the victories are so small, and the bar is so low. “The Forever Purge” has no qualms in making clear what’s happening (the phrase “forever purge” is said often), but it also is trying to appease as wide an outraged audience as possible. Its dialogue is junky and goofy, but it’s also coded: it only calls out this scourge of whiteness carefully (with phrases like “only full-blooded Americans are welcome here”) as if afraid to make the audience truly sit with the real scourge of white supremacy. Instead, it’s the in-between lines with a wink, in the same way, these movies decry the National Rifle Association but rely on guns so heavily for their entertainment and appreciate the power of the gun in so many of its rote action sequences. Even five movies in, this is still blockbuster horror that’s condensed in a way so that middle schoolers can surmise its commentary while planning future Halloween costumes, and that only the easiest of targets—literal Nazis, like the guy here who has a swastika tattooed on his face—are called out.
“The Forever Purge” is terrible at selling itself, so beholden to the lowered expectations of “Purge”-brand carnage that it brings little substance to the table. Gout’s entry should be a victory lap for this relatively often dumb and dirty treatise on all that’s wrong with America, especially one that has become so powerful with multiple box office hits. Instead, it displays all that makes these movies a failed experiment in blockbuster exploitation. [D+]
