The First Purge

Year 14, Day 269 - 9/26/22 - Movie #4,253

BEFORE: OK, just four little "Purge" movies and then I'm ready for the real horror countdown to start. Last year I tackled the "Scream" movies, well, all except the most recent one, and the year before that, I finally got around to watching all the "Twilight" movies - so I guess I'm good for about one four-movie series per year.  But there are all kinds of horror franchises that I haven't gotten to yet, like all the "Halloween" films, the "Saw" films, the "Child's Play" series, the "Final Destination" movies, and then of course there's "Nightmare on Elm Street" and the "Friday the 13th" series - I'm not sure if I'd ever be THAT desperate, but then again, I don't know how many more years of OCD-based movie watching still lie ahead. I can't even tell you what horror movies I'll be watching next year, though - I'll maybe try to figure out my best October 2023 chain over the holiday break, but new horror films are coming on to the list all the time, so the plan is always changing. I can only do what I can do this Movie Year, and then maybe worry about the next one. 

Lex Scott Davis carries over from "Sweet Girl". 

THE PLOT: America's third political party, the New Founding Fathers of America, comes to power and conducts an experiment: no laws for 12 hours on Staten Island. No one has to stay on the island, but $5,000 is given to anyone who does. 

AFTER: A third political party? That would never happen, right? Unless, oh, I don't know, suddenly a bunch of Republicans determined that the de facto leader of their party is a giant crook who never wanted to be President in the first place, that he only ran as a joke, couldn't back out of it, didn't lift a finger doing any work running the country for FOUR YEARS, and then decided to cash in by stealing a bunch of top secret documents to sell on the black market to the highest bidder, which would probably be Russia or Saudi Arabia?  That all sounds pretty crazy - but maybe it could happen?  I think even THEN the Republicans would never admit that they're the minority party in this country, and can only win elections by gerrymandering the vote and  preventing minorities from voting by mail while also accusing the Democrats of tampering with voting machines using Jewish space lasers designed by Hugo Chavez.  

I think the Democrats are equally as likely to block the formation of a credible third party - I mean, we've got the Green Party and the Working Families and the Socialist parties, but come on, nobody takes them seriously.  If our country had multiple parties like the Europeans do, then they'd have to create temporary voting alliances just to get bills passed, and then even Congress would get even LESS done than they do now, as far-fetched as that seems. No, we're stuck with two parties for the foreseeable future, though I'll admit I personally love it whenever Republicans lose ground or totally misread the room on something like abortion or inflation or healthcare. 

So the "First Purge" movie gets this part wrong, but there's SO, SO much that it gets right, like racial tensions being at an all-time high, the economy tanking worse than ever, and massive dissatisfaction with the government's take on social issues and the economy.  And this movie was released in 2018, it just HAD to be in production for some time, at least a couple years, so the writers looked into their crystal balls and imagined a near-future that was almost as dystopian as the real year 2020.  Of course, they couldn't have predicted the pandemic, but race riots and civil unrest and the greatest economic class disparity ever, they got all that right.  But in the real world we got "Black Lives Matter", and in the film universe, they got the First Purge. 

The "theory" behind the First Purge is that Americans needed some kind of outlet, one day a year where they could just act out, get all those violent tendencies out of their system, purge the urge to commit violent acts by, well, committing violent acts.  It's so simple that's it's logically stupid - should we deal with potential school shooters by letting them shoot up a school?  Should we deal with potential bank robbers by letting them rob banks?  No, of course not.  So why the hell should there be one day a year when U.S. citizens can do illegal things, up to and including murder, and not get charged with crimes?  

It's at this point that I should acknowledge that I KNOW I'm watching the fourth film in the franchise first - but the fourth film is the prequel, it takes place first.  It's the opposite of "Star Wars", where the first film released actually took place fourth.  The first film "The Purge" was much tougher to link to, and I saw an easy way to link to the prequel first, so that's what I'm doing.  Like a few years ago when I ran through the James Bond films, I started with the recent "Casino Royale", because that's the new origin story, then after "Quantum of Solace" I went back to "Dr. No" and moved forward from there.  Perhaps that's a bad analogy because there's no real hard & fast chronology for the Bond films, they all take place in "story time", and can probably all be watched in any order, really.  But I'm all about finding the order in which I want or need to watch the movies in a series, and as always, your mileage may vary. 

If I had started with "The Purge" and saved this prequel for last, it's possible that I would have spent three movies screaming at the TV set, saying "WHY is all this happening?" or "How the hell did this all start in the first place?"  See, now I don't have to do that, because I know.  But maybe the big reveal in "First Purge" about the how and the why of it all should have been saved for later, but you know what, screw it.  Let's get some understanding, as quickly as possible, I simply don't have time to fool around. Are you ready?  Do you want to know the big mystery, why there's a purge every year in the future?  Because there are too damn many people, that's why.  The government is willing to turn a blind eye, one day a year, to everything including murder, because it will decrease the excess population - once the Purge thing catches on and expands to the whole country, and that's great for the economy, right? And if they do it right, and target the low-income neighborhoods, then fewer people on welfare, fewer services need to be provided in the future, and hey, good news for the gun manufacturers and also the insurance companies, that won't have to pay out as much.  So, really, where's the harm?  

The last movie to get the future this correct, was of course, "Freejack". But maybe the Purge movies are on to something as well. Perhaps it was easier for President "Bracken" to get elected if there were three main candidates, because then votes would be split among three fronts, and a candidate would only need like 34% to win the popular vote.  But man, what a nightmare the electoral college would be in that election - how would any candidate get the required 270 votes, or did nobody get enough and the House elected the President?  Inquiring minds want to know.

But all of this is beside the point - the bigger concern is that they tested the Purge concept first for one day on Staten Island.  Makes sense, I'd start there, too, because even if that whole island blows up, no great loss, right?  We'd find another way to get to New Jersey if we needed to. OK, so no more Ribfest in May, but I can get ribs other places.  12 hours, one day, everything's legal in Staten Island, and anybody who stays on the island and survives gets $5,000, more if they want to get out there and do some crime, which gets recorded via eyeball camera for the home internet viewers.  Really, isn't this just the plot of the fake "Liberty City Survivor" TV show from the "Grand Theft Auto 3" videogame?  "We'll take 20 recently paroled felons and equip them with grenade launchers and flamethrowers and watch them hunt each other down!"

Oh, those optimistic Staten Islanders, they thought they could just host church socials and pot-lucks and just count down those 12 hours in blissful solidarity, then collect their monies.  But the fix was in from the start, and when the organizers realized that not enough people were playing the game for it to be as entertaining as the Roman gladiator fests, they sent in the ringers - the Klan and the white Nazis, who had maps showing them where the brown people live.  OK, now we got a game, but that's not really playing fair, is it?  Why you always got to make this about race, do you realize you're just proving Charles Manson right in the end?

Beware the New Founding Fathers, they turned out to just be the same old white racists in the end.  Why, it's almost as if we're getting a look at what might have happened if the January 6th Insurrectionists had won, which, honestly, they didn't really plan for.  Here you've got a bunch of idiots trying to take over the U.S. Capitol building and dismantle the election process and maybe even the whole legislative system, but ask yourself this, what if they HAD been more successful, what if they HAD hung Mike Pence, and burned down the whole system from within?  What would they then have replaced it with?  Were those numbskulls ready to run their own government, from the ashes of the old one?  I guarantee you, those idiots might have known how to break into a building, but not a single one of them knew anything about running a country.  And so the mission was doomed to fail, because they had no clear definition of success.  We're going to walk down to the Capitol building, and protest, and break stuff, and, umm, then we'll, umm, go home I guess?

A couple years ago, 2018 in the before-times, my wife and I were doing BBQ Crawl #2, across Texas, and we found ourselves in Austin with nothing to do.  Instead of going to see those bats that fly out from under that bridge at dusk (Ewwww....nasty) we toured the Texas Capitol building, and we were quite surprised that we could just walk in, through a metal detector of course, but after that we were basically on our own.  The Texas Senate was not in session, and it was close to 5 pm, so we pretty much had the place to ourselves.  I said - JOKINGLY - that we should get down on to the Senate floor and start passing some laws.  And we did, but of course we knew our motions would have no effect, in an otherwise empty room.  Still, we had more of a plan in mind than the January 6th insurrectionists had at the U.S. Capitol last year. Just saying.

So it's a battle royale for the soul of Staten Island, pitting the gang-bangers up against the white supremacists, and the social activists against the drug-addicted serial killers.  Yep, I gotta say, this film really understands what makes Staten Island tick.  Kudos. And it made $137 million with a budget of $13 million - that's a successful film according to the most important measure of all.

Also starring Y'lan Noel, Joivan Wade, Mugga (last seen in "Precious"), Patch Darragh (last seen in "Brittany Runs a Marathon"), Marisa Tomei (last seen in "Human Capital"), Luna Lauren Velez (last seen in "Shaft" (2019)), Kristen Solis, Rotimi Paul, Mo McRae (last seen in "Aftermath"), Jermel Howard (last seen in "The Brave One"), Siya, Christian Robinson, Steve Harris (last seen in "The Mod Squad"), Derek Basco, DK Bowser, Mitchell Edwards, Maria Rivera, Chyna Layne (last seen in "Life of Crime"), Ian Blackman (last seen in "The Report"), Melonie Diaz (last seen in "Save the Date"), Naszir Nance, Peter Johnson, Levy Tran, Kevin Carrigan, Katina Forte, Jane Fergus (last seen in "Joker"), Alan Pietruszewski (last seen in "Greenland"), Aaron Moss, Logan Crawford (last seen in "You Don't Know Jack"), with cameos from Van Jones (last seen in "Mayor Pete"), Boomer Mays (last seen in "Cruella") and the voice of Cindy Robinson

RATING: 5 out of 10 Emergency Broadcast System announcements