The First Purge
The Purge series have always been intriguing but they never quite reach up to their potential. This fact doesn’t really change with the 4th addition to the series.
I am on record for saying backstories don’t matter and that’s why prequels are awful. It’s actually quite frustrating to be right in this instance.
The lead actor might have changed skin colours thanks to some sinister producer wanting to capitalise on Black Panther’s popularity. They don’t quite understand Black Panther’s success can’t be replicated by making the actors black in your film and setting it in the projects.
The Purge is a high concept film. It has a mass appeal because the premise is easy to understand and quite intriguing. High concept films are tricky because it’s up to the filmmakers to expand the high concept into an emotional piece of art. By itself, it works on trailers and makes marketers happy and that’s the stage this series is stuck at. The high concept idea that keeps on giving financially, still doesn’t work creatively even with a new director attached.
Since I first watched the original Purge film, I wanted a more clever take on this concept. But instead, they just remade the same film with the same story structure 4 times.
The First Purge is especially frustrating because they bait you at the first and second acts of the film as if the political and psychological elements are going somewhere but at one point, the film literally destroys it’s own side plot because they just run out of ideas, I guess?
The whole reason the government decides on this Purge plan is because they want to kill the poor. Which is an information given on all Purge films and even though this is a prequel, that’s pretty much all you get out of this as well.
The whole killing the blacks situation borders on offensive.
The cinematography is quite good in some scenes. Especially at the beginning of the purge. But later, I’m very indecisive. I think rather than lighting and camera, the problems has to do with production design. The sets/locations just don’t look very interesting.
At the end of the film, there is a huge and explosive fight scene just like in the previous ones. It’s very big, lots of guns, explosions. I think these are the weakest parts of these films. Raid, the film they are borrowing from made it so much better.
Where Purge series shine is the atmosphere, costume designs and the wackiness that spills out every so often. They need to embrace the campness, stop being so serious and go full wacky. It’s an unintentional satire anyway with B-Grade actors and ideas taken from other films. They might as well go full commando.
The Purge series keep getting crushed under their concept’s weight. Unfortunately, they are still making money so we will see more of them.
