The First Purge: A Redundant Prequel
This prequel adds nothing new to the franchise, which once delivered successful and original violent horror films about an America that allows a night of unbridled violence once a year.
Systemic crisis, unemployment, and social stratification have brought a new force to power in America. Calling themselves the “New Founding Fathers,” the party promises to restore order and resolve accumulated conflicts, but society must accept a series of unpopular measures. The authorities consider cruelty and violence to be one of America’s most painful problems, so New York is offered a unique experiment: for one whole night, one of the city’s districts will become a territory where laws or morals will not apply – all so that anyone can satisfy their bloodlust for the year ahead. Not everyone understands that they have entered a real battlefield, not a fun masquerade, and then the experimenters in power resort to additional incentives, fueling animosity and a thirst for death.
None of the actors involved in the previous three films appear in the prequel. Similarly, in the upcoming “Purge” TV series, none of the characters already known to viewers of the franchise have been announced yet.
Experienced viewers have long ceased to be surprised by Hollywood’s ability to grow an entire cinematic universe from any more or less working idea. Rather, the rare cases of sequels being absent from successful projects have become puzzling. “The Purge” in 2013 did not particularly stand out, except for two notable actors in the leading roles, energetic editing, and a straightforward social message. But lo and behold, it received two sequels, far from the original, and now a prequel. This is a common situation for a franchise – to return to the beginning at some point, and for “The Purge,” it’s also a good way to go beyond the local conflicts that formed the basis of the scripts for the first three films. However, “The First Purge” cannot be called a breakthrough. Alas, a step back turned into a fall.
The prequel had potential. It could have told about a good dozen interesting things surrounding the tradition of the most violent night on earth: from the emergence of the rule to use only certain types of weapons to the birth of the tradition of wearing impressive masks, from the emergence of the idea of gladiatorial fights in the center of the metropolis to the introduction of betting on “survivalists.” The authors of “The First Purge,” unfortunately, did not dig deep and limited themselves to another night of bloody adventure, assigning it “number one” for the sake of order. No, of course, there is a reference to the fact that this is the first massacre – here you have an “interview” with potential killers, and the fact that ordinary residents of Staten Island do not immediately understand the full danger of the innovation, and psychologists furrowing their brows, unraveling the mystery of the nature of violence. But in general, the film works according to familiar patterns. James DeMonaco, the director of the previous installments and the screenwriter of “The First Purge,” used to clearly define who the good guys are and who the bad guys are in his world, but this time it turned out somehow especially clumsy – the film degenerated from social satire into an awkward propaganda piece.
Actor Rotimi Paul, who played the role of the mad drug addict Skelenton, specifically rode the New York subway to the audition in the guise and makeup of his character – this helped him understand how frightening a character he was going to play.
The fairly high box office receipts for horror films of the first three films showed that viewers are willing to put up with stilted characters and predictable plot twists – they mainly want more blood and cruel torture. And here the authors of “The First Purge” do not disappoint: there are plenty of crazy psychos, heavily armed soldiers, fueling the conflict from within, bandits dividing power in the night city. There will be a lot of shootings, fights, and explosions, but the semantic load in everything that happens, even compared to the first films, is almost zero. And the problem here is not in the work of the fight choreographers or stuntmen, not in the efforts of the special effects specialists, and not in the lack of charisma of the actors (the leading trio Ilan Noel, Lex Scott Davis, and Joivan Wade are just coping with their tasks), the trouble is in the plot slippage – it turned out that the authors have nothing to tell.
Final Thoughts
This, by the way, does not mean the end of “The Purge” as a concept. On the contrary, many details of this amazing and not at all unambiguous hypothetical experiment remained undisclosed. It’s just that at this stage there was a failure – a film appeared in the franchise that is not necessary to watch. But this happens, and this only fuels interest in the upcoming sequel, this time in the format of a television series. After all, once the worms have been released from the jar, they cannot be driven back, which means that fishing will take place, and very soon. It is only necessary for dusk to fall and the familiar siren to sound.