The problem with The Purge franchise is that for three films—with slight positive exceptions in sophomore effort The Purge: Anarchy (2014)—an immensely smart idea has been executed with baffling dumbness by its creator, writer and director, James DeMonaco. The fourth entry, The First Purge, slams on the brakes and propels backwards plot-wise while shockingly pushing the series forward in terms of creative and cultural possibilities.
It focuses on the first “experiment,” where the city of Staten Island, NY, was closed off for a 12-hour night where all crime became legal, including murder. The idea was met with protests and enthusiasm alike, with the film using real-life Resist rally footage and even bringing us a Van Jones cameo for some authentic American reporting. The logical question of “Why don’t they just leave?” is answered simply through the fact that the government—a fictional(?) republic deemed “The New Founding Fathers”—has offered stipends of $5,000 or more for Staten Island citizens who stay behind and participate in the experiment, purposefully targeting lower-income individuals to whom this amount of money would be crucial.
Finally, the film begins to dig into the rich material of the franchise’s subject matter, something prior Purge installments were never able to achieve because they were too busy focusing on the next slasher-film-style kill in a group of survivalists. The First Purge certainly follows similar beats with its main characters’ plight to survive the night. There’s Nya (Lex Scott Davis) and her brother, Isaiah (Joivan Wade), who live in a shitty apartment in Staten Island’s center, as well as a drug kingpin named Dmitri (Y’lan Noel). Their stories link up through convenience and such, and of course there’s a fair amount of violence, but the trajectory of the story and the amount of time the film spends scrutinizing the implications of its content is what makes it so different from its predecessors.
The First Purge feels thematically and visually renewed. The script, again by DeMonaco, is his strongest by far, pulling no punches with a blatant “pussy-grabbing mother fucker” line and hordes of white men in KKK attire storming low-income neighborhoods to massacre their citizens. Some may call the relevance cheap and easy, but the real horror of The Purge franchise has always lied in it correlations to reality. Aesthetically, this is the best-looking Purge film, with DeMonaco finally passing the reigns to a new director: Gerard McMurray. There’s a blood-spattered scene of white-sheeted mercenaries being sliced and diced by their retaliating victims that is so visually different from anything the franchise has ever done that it felt like an entirely new franchise had begun.
If this is the beginning of a new direction for the franchise, one which highlights the early years of “The Purge” event and digs into the ultimate theme—how low-income citizens and minorities are the main targets due to overpopulation and lack of government aid—then this once-flailing franchise may have some life in it yet.
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