Directed by Everardo Gout
Written by James DeMonaco
Starring Ana de la Reguera, Josh Lucas, Will Patton, Tenoch Huerta
Running time 1 hour, 43 minutes
MPAA rated R "for strong/bloody violence, and language throughout"

by Hunter Bush, Staff Writer

Back in 2013 when the original Purge came out, I remember thinking that it looked fun and was a great, if laughably implausible scenario for a movie: Everyone in the country just doesn't really do crime until this one night of the year? Pull the other one, Blumhouse. Now though, the damn franchise is almost as prescient, as "ripped from the headlines" as the latest Law & Order episodes. It's astounding and a little frightening.

Filming for The Forever Purge began in November of 2019 and wrapped in February 2020 and even though these films are written to be topical, dealing with the societal issues of the time, there was no way series creator and writer James DeMonaco could have anticipated just how on-point he would be. The inciting incident in The Forever Purge is essentially the January 6th assault on the Capitol, but on a national scale: well-armed lunatics, disillusioned with the direction the country is headed and thinking themselves somehow "more American" than the rest of the country attempt to change things by force.

The concept of who is–and what makes you–American is what The Forever Purge is concerned with. Remember, it had finished filming before the COVID-19 crisis reached its apex, before the assault on the Capitol, back when the smart money would have been on immigration and border policies being the next big national concern and it's legitimately staggering how many dystopic moments our country has been through in just the last 18 months or so.

This concept of a Dystopian Turducken is present in The Forever Purge, but in a more believable, grounded, realistic-feeling way than *checks notes* real life. That's right, the franchise where all crime is legal for 12 hours once a year feels like it operates on better internal logic than the world we all wake up to each day. As I mentioned above, after we've introduced our characters, and watched them all get through that year's Purge Night uneventfully, we see that there are some folks around who don't want the Purge to end, so they just keep Purging. Like Dory from Finding Nemo, if she were wearing a skull mask and brandishing a machete.

To be honest with you, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. I was expecting there to be some puppet master manipulating events from behind the scenes; a face we could ascribe this evilness to. But there isn't one. To that end, late in the runtime our group of survivors encounter insurrectionists lead by a pair calling themselves Mother and Father because a movie will always feel more satisfying if you end it by killing the bad guy and it's pretty impossible to shoot the concept of Dangerous Social Unrest in the head and call it a day.

That's something which continually impresses me in the Purge series: their track record of making smart cinematic choices at the expense of franchise tendencies. The original trilogy of The Purge (2013), Anarchy (2014), and Election Year (2016), kept expanding on the size and scope of the previous entry before juking back around with prequel The First Purge (2018). At some point, upping the scale becomes untenable and less engaging, unless you're The Fast & The Furious of course–the exception which proves the rule–so I was glad that while the story unfolding around our main characters was of a national scale, our gang wasn't going to "fix" it. They're all just concerned with their own survival and as a result, it's easy for us to be, too.

Since the Purge films don't follow the same group of characters through every installment, like the Fasts & Furiouses, we start The Forever Purge with a blank slate and have a limited time - under 2 hours (!) - to establish our characters. There's the ranch owning Tucker family consisting of a patriarch (Will Patton), his adult children (Josh Lucas and Leven Rambin) and daughter-in-law (Cassidy Freeman) as well as two of their employees Juan (Tenoch Huerta) and TT (Alejandro Edda) and Juan's wife Adela (Ana de la Reguera), all kicking around in the opening act of the film.

That's a lot of characters to introduce and on top of that there's also a bunch of thematic track to lay regarding what makes you an American. Can someone be "more American" than someone else? Are the Tucker family - life long Texans - more American than Juan and his wife who have been in the US for ten months? Until now, the Purge films have been more focused on class disparity than race as a theme, though since class and race are so inextricably linked in the country race and racism have popped up a few times in the franchise. Still it's refreshing to see a shift in franchise focus that feels both timely and like a natural extension of what has come before. Sure, some of the more thematically-relevant moments are subtler than others, but it's still admirable to see filmmakers equally committed to both entertainment and enlightenment.

The Forever Purge is extremely well-balanced in that regard. For every time I felt like the film was pointedly commenting on something, there were twice as many moments where I was completely lost in the movie, enjoying myself. Watching characters plow through roadblocks in a huge truck? Awesome. Bad guys getting their heads pulverized by construction equipment? That's half of why I showed up!

Way back before production on The Forever Purge had begun, James DeMonaco had said that he thought of it as the last installment in the franchise, but seeing the note that it ends on (no spoilers here, don't worry) I don't know if I think that's still true. This feels like it could be the start of a new take on the universe, new goals, new opposition, new challenges. I'm ready for those movies; ready for whatever's next. I just hope it stays more firmly in the realm of fiction.