The Doctor’s Diagnosis: F
I saw this movie yesterday and my initial reaction was that it was in the D-D+ range. I expected it to be awful and it was, but I wasn’t surprised by the awfulness and, consequently, it didn’t particularly piss me off. After a day of reflection, that doesn’t make any sense. My thinking was akin to expecting somebody to be an asshole and then giving them bonus points for meeting that expectation. I honestly can’t think of a single nice thing to say about The Forever Purge. As with the last couple of entries in the series, this has abandoned any semblance of being a thriller in favor of being a condescendingly simple-minded political rant. More so than previous entries, this one doesn’t even attempt to have puerile things like characters and plot and the result is a film that somehow manages to stand out for being shallow and pretentious even by modern standards.
This entry takes place on the Texas/Mexico border and the actual purge is barely touched upon in the first act. The rest of the film is concerned with domestic terrorists that don’t acknowledge the end of the purge and continue a reign of lawlessness to totally purge the country of those that they seem undesirable. In other words, its about white people hunting down minorities. We then follow a group of people, all of whom have the kind of character depth reminiscent of a lesser Blue’s Clues episode, as they flee for the Mexican border to escape America.
In a befuddling move, this is basically a Purge movie without a purge. By removing the core plot device, this movie does away with the one thing that provided this series with any originality or spark. Now that the violence no longer revolves around this concept, the series is reduced to a generic action film as a group of nothing characters make their way through a hail of gunfire over and over and over again. There really is nothing else to this in terms of plot. I always thought that it was a stretch to label the Purge series as horror films, but this isn’t even a thriller. This is a rewrite away from being a direct-to-video action movie from the late 90s.
I could deal with generic action, though, if its primary goal was to entertain me rather than lecture me. And lecture me it did, with less nuance than a shovel to the face. I try to avoid discussing politics as much as possible in these reviews, so I’m not going into great detail here. The film uses the Purge concept as a loose framework for a diatribe about immigration and gun violence that has absolutely zero interest in suspense or entertainment or even conversation. If you’re going to use a film like this to make a political point, then at least do so with greater tact than a first-grader writing their first paper for social studies class (or whatever they call it now).
Since the film is just a political speech set around a loose narrative, there is little distinction in the characters. They become empty vessels for hammering a message into the viewers and are devoid of any actual character traits that could develop a sense of investment from the audience. I can’t even remember a single character’s name from the film and I don’t care enough to look them up. They are just talking points with faces moving from generic scene to generic scene. The villains suffer the same fate, as there are no notable villains here. Hell, I don’t think there even is a primary protagonist. The movie is simply color-coded: if somebody is anything but white, they are a good guy; if they are white and not a main character, then they are evil. These no-name characters repeatedly shoot at each other across those racial lines for nearly two hours and I guess I’m supposed to be so enthralled by the message that I don’t notice how boring and tired it all is. I did notice.
I once fell down my basement stairs and cracked my head open on the floor, knocking me out cold (Jagermeister may have been involved). The impact of the concrete floor on my skull still ranks as a more subtle experience than watching this movie. I don’t care about your politics, I don’t want to hear about your politics. I don’t give a shit. My point is not to engage in a political debate, but rather highlight the childishness of these filmmakers. My point is that this is a film written by people that consider their political beliefs to be self-evident truths that supersede the need for actual entertainment value in a film. I expected that from a Purge movie, but the fact that I expected it to be crap doesn’t excuse it for being crap.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_Purge#/media/File:Forever_Purge_poster.jpg
