The film basically says that all of America wants to purge - except for those in the inner city, who are too desperate, or goodhearted, or something to even bother. But “The First Purge,” which is the first entry in the franchise not to be directed by James DeMonaco (he wrote the script but has handed off the directorial reins to Gerard McMurray), just sort of skulks along.
The first purge series#
I found the last “Purge” film, “The Purge: Election Year,” to be the most rousing of the series - an outrageous cartoon allegory. Those who see “The First Purge” may ask the same question. May Updale (Marisa Tomei), and the sleazy NFFA chief of staff, Arlo Sabian (Patch Darragh), observe that there isn’t enough purging going on to give their experiment the kicky publicity it needed. When the night is halfway over, the scientist who created it, Dr. But no: From the start, the Purge is all planned, the whole thing designed as a government conspiracy. Part of the dramatic promise of “The First Purge” is that it will show us how the original Purge boiled up out of the cauldron of a newly seething America.
The first purge movie#
The movie opens with one of those America-descending-into-social-anarchy montages that have been a cinematic staple since “World War Z.” Only now, of course, it feels more timely than ever, because it taps right into the hater nation we’ve become. It’s a threadbare “Boyz N the Hood” meets “Lord of the Flies.” “The First Purge” is a slipshod dystopian pulp comic book rooted in gangbanger clichés. “Get Out” was a thriller with a devious texture, rooted in social and psychological experience. It’s likely that the film’s Purge-in-the-hood concept had more than a little to do with the success that Blumhouse, the franchise’s key production company, enjoyed with “Get Out.” Yet if a “Purge” film built around the lives of African-Americans seems a totally good idea, and is more than likely to prove a commercial one, coming from Blumhouse it only highlights the difference between the two films.
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But if there’s a message buried in there somewhere, one that’s designed to power a B-movie for the age of Black Lives Matter, “The First Purge” isn’t without its own whiff of exploitation. They wear video contact lenses that give them the look of iridescent-eyed aliens, and everything that happens is broadcast, with a kind of lip-smacking “Hunger Games” breathlessness, by the national news media. On Staten Island, where the action clusters around the Park Hill Towers housing projects, each of the Purge participants gets $5,000, with the price set to go up the more mayhem they commit.
The first purge crack#
It’s the first “Purge” film to be set in the inner city, and that allows it to play off the notion that the government is only too eager to trash the lives of African-Americans, in a way that echoes the social paranoia of the ’70s and ’80s, when the heroin and crack epidemics were believed by many to be the deliberate fallout of racist government policies - a way of narcotizing the underclass. One of the semi-jokes of the “Purge” films, with their hooky set-ups, their mostly cruddy lighting and staging, and their “Clockwork Orange”-meets-Roger Corman graze-Z nihilism, is that they’re rooted in a preening sort of “sociology” that’s tuned into the zeitgeist but, at the same time, comes off as more than a little mindless. It is, in other words ( nudge, nudge), a typical night in the hood.
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