The First Purge review: Trump's America under fire in this semi-satirical horrorfest

Matthew Norman6 July 2018

The most notable show of restraint in the The First Purge, a lividly, unsubtle, semi-satirical horror movie about the contemporary United States, is its shunning of a popular mantra.

We never hear the words Make America Great Again, or see them on baseball caps, though the identity of its chief target is clear without them.

You-know-who may not fulfil his vow to revive coal mining, but one industry he is guaranteed to turbocharge is the production of dystopian movies. This prequel to writer James DeMonaco’s trilogy of low-budget box-office smashes is the first acid rainfall of the downpour to come.

The clever premise of this franchise seems remarkably prescient given that it was launched in 2013, in the age of Barack Obama. Amid the aftershocks of an economic earthquake, a vibrantly populist party, New Founding Fathers of America (NFFA), wins the White House on a platform of isolationism and pledges of untold future wealth.

It then introduces an unusually charming policy. For one night each year, every crime up to and including murder may be committed with impunity. The official aim is literally to blood-let the baser human instincts, thereby concertina-ing almost all annual violence into a 12-hour time frame and so slash crime.

The startling turn of electoral events in 2016 offered DeMonaco, writer-director of the first three and writer-producer of this fourth, an irresistible opening to retrofit his series with a stridently topical origin story in which a New York borough is the guinea pig for the initial Purge. First we’ll take Staten Island (as Leonard Cohen might have put it if he’d been a race-baiting fascist with no idea about scansion)… then we’ll take the entire USA.

The First Purge, in pictures

1/6

The purgers and purgees in the NFFA’s crosshairs are poor, oppressed and dark-skinned. Anyone may leave before the sirens begin the merriment, and all the whites apparently do. But a $5,000 bribe to stay, with lavish bonuses for legalised killing, is too tempting for poverty-ridden people of colour.

Thus begins an event conceived by the comically naive Dr Updale (Marisa Tomei). Updale’s rationale is opaque, but somehow — despite working for a party funded and basically run by the National Rifle Association — she thinks it a beneficial social experiment.

The NFFA thinks differently. It means to use the Purge to inveigle black (and a smattering of Hispanic) people to harm one another for the amusement of white folks — old-time heavyweight boxing, in other words, with guns for gloves — watching on TV via the luridly illuminated camera contact lenses worn by the combatants.

At the human heart of the story is a trio of the ghettoised. Dmitri (Y’lan Noel) is the sweetest-natured drug lord you’ll encounter in all your puff. He still loves ex-girlfriend Nya (Lex Scott Davis), as she does him. But she’s a strictly moral community organiser, and her disapproval of his career spikes when she learns that younger brother Isaiah (Joivan Wade), a good kid forced by poverty to do bad stuff, is working one of Dmitri’s street corners.

All will be tested during the Purge. So will slimy presidential chief of staff Arlo Sabian (Patch Darragh) because it doesn’t go according to The Hunger Games template. Apart from one grinning psychotic, no one is attacking anyone.

American nightmare: A struggle to survive
Universal Pictures

Deriding the NFFA assumption that black people are never more than a tweak from savagery (see Trump on Chicago), they treat the Purge as a new national holiday and party. Far from being divided, they are brought closer.

Up to the point at which an anxious Sabian sends in squads of white mercenaries in ghoulish masks to manufacture the image of blacks attacking blacks — “What have I done?” asks Dr Updale, hilariously — the movie impresses.

Bolstered by bleak docu-drama lighting, it has real urgency. Harnessing its righteous fury about the blood libelling of minorities for propaganda, it takes a compellingly intense sledgehammer to this tragically regressive twist away from justice in the arc of American history.

But then, quite suddenly, it releases that harness, gives up on the satire and switches genre. It becomes a lazily scripted, laughably under-characterised B movie bloodfest in which the glancing visual references to horror classics (a Chucky mask from Child’s Play; the hand stretching out through a roadside grille from It) are massively outnumbered by the slashed jugulars and endless rounds of gunfire.

The slaughter is handled artfully enough by Gerard McMurray, the young African-American director to whom DeMonaco handed the reins. And there’s no denying that watching the KKK and trigger-happy racist cops get theirs at the hands of the persecuted will pleasure those who reckon rough justice is better than none.

For all that, a chance has been blown. The inventive adaption of the horror genre into a spotlight to illuminate contemporary racism made Get Out one of the best films of recent years.

Despite sharing a production company with that instant classic, The First Purge wastes its early promise by jettisoning its satirical ambition in favour of a schlock horror killing bonanza that comes to feel tiresomely gratuitous before the end.

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