Legalized Crime Returns for a Night, but Some Take it Further

Ana de la Reguera in "The Forever Purge"
Photo Credit: RottenTomatoes.com

It’s hard to believe that we already have five movies in the “Purge” series.  While the first film had an intriguing premise (a one-night-a-year event where all crime is legal for 12 hours), it just added up to your standard home-invasion thriller, and the rest of the series hasn’t fared much better.  All of them have almost become interchangeable at this point, offering very little that’s new as we go from movie to movie.

This trend continues with director Everado Gout’s “The Forever Purge.”  Try as this movie might to bring us something that it thinks is thought-provoking, all it does is spoon-feed more social/political commentary to the audience.

The story follows a group of ranchers who have made it through the latest Purge, but now must do what they can to survive a growing number of people who continue to commit violent crimes.

The primary set of performers includes Ana de la Reguera, Tenoch Huerta, Josh Lucas, Cassidy Freeman, Leven Rambin, Alejandro Edda, and Will Patton.  They all do their best with the material, making us care somewhat about what happens to their characters.  However, they’re thinly written to the point where any good will that you have for them will be gone before the movie ends.

The screenplay by James DeMonaco, who wrote all four previous movies and directed the first three, is more of the same of what has come before, with one-dimensional protagonists fighting against one-dimensional villains.  As with the other films, there’s heavy-handed social/political commentary aplenty.  While it’s great having subtext to make you think about a film from several angles, subtly was never a strong point in this series, and this latest installment hits critical mass as far as unsubtly is concerned.  The cringeworthy clumsiness gets to the point where it takes you out of the movie.  While the draw of these films is their continued use of relevant topics, its approach would work much better if they went for a less-obvious approach.  Of course, there are times where, in order to tell the story, you might have to be a little blunt, but there are several moments in the movie where the screenwriter could have toned it down, and therefore make the message more impactful.

In a movie with few highlights, one of them is the action set-pieces, particularly in the second half.  There’s one such sequence that’s filmed as a long take, with cinematography by Luis Sansans.  This segment has the main group of characters trying to make it through the ravaged streets of El Paso as the chaos commences around them, making it an instant where the technical craft immerses you in the events of the movie.

As a director, Gout employs far too many cheap jump scares, accompanied by that ever-annoying blare of sound.  These scares don’t have any effect on you whatsoever, making the setup for each of them a waste of time because you can always tell when they’re coming.  What this movie shows is that Gout is better at crafting action, rather than scares, which makes sense because this movie often feels less like a horror film than it does an action film, and this installment would have been better had they stuck with the latter tone.

This movie may be called “The Forever Purge,” but let’s hope this series doesn’t last much longer.

Grade: C-