Dystopian action films such as The Purge: Election Year have been rather divisive and overblown lately. It’s a subgenre that’s fairly been exploited, which happens with any genre alongside the action. The dystopian elements and the underlying themes serve merely as a plot device for all the things that visibly escalate. And even though they’re based in the distant or near future, things that take place look barely any different to things from today or even a decade or two ago.
Such is the repetitiveness of the modern-day action genre. The Purge franchise has pretty much been among the weaker action and dystopian films too. It barely manages to have a grain of originality but isn’t the worst thing to ever happen to at least the action genre.
The Purge: Election Year is nothing worth watching, but we won’t criticize you for finding it okay, unlike its predecessors. It’s fairly better than the first two films in multiple facets but is still a middling film overall. It provides more fashionable scenarios and sequences than the first two films, but unfortunately, that’s all it does and makes the fact that it’s produced by Michael Bay understandable.
How to Stream or Download The Purge: Election Year
To stream or to download the film, click on the Download button located below this review. Check out also the sequels to this film: The First Purge (2018) and The Forever Purge (2021).
The Movie Review
The premise of the story is nothing very interesting by itself, but it does feature a bunch of interesting scenes and sequences that one could simply watch on YouTube. The Purge: Election Year’s scenarios sound fashionable but only on paper. The story and the characters do not compel you much, but they’re not terribly written either.
It starts in 2022, where a young Charlene “Charlie” Roan and her family are kidnapped by a Purger who makes them play a deadly game where the mother chooses the sole survivor of the family, whereas everyone else would die.
Charlie, who’s chosen by her mother gets to experience the trauma of watching her mother, father and brother die. Eighteen years after the incident,
Charlie is now a U.S. senator and campaigns for the presidency. Her premise is to end the annual Purge nights. Edwidge Owens and his party The New Founding Fathers of America (NFFA) begin to see Roan as a threat and revoke government officials’ immunity from purge nights. It is clear that all things in this relatively close dystopian future go in favor of purging.
It’s a depressing universe, but for all the toxic reasons, even the agenda of the purge-resisting kind are pretty dense. James DeMonaco’s storyline is something that could’ve worked much better for a video game instead. The political thrill goes on in the background for the most part, while what we witness throughout the film is Purging every other minute.
The direction is not very subtle either and relies much more on either the spectacle or the dialogue, which surprisingly isn’t corny enough for a middling film. The actors are not to blame for a film that barely allows them to act either.
Speaking of the storyline fitting the nature of a video game better, it’s not necessarily the premise that would work better as a video game, but the way it entirely plays out too.
As a film, there’s very little artistry that it offers but is not necessarily terrible. In fact, the context of the political aspects is much superior to the prior two films. Jacques Jouffret‘s cinematography and Nathan Whitehead’s original score are about as mediocre as the film itself.
The only aspect that works as a pro is that it doesn’t necessarily suck at a good number of aspects.
The Purge: Election Year is a slightly superior, yet still middling entry to The Purge franchise. It’s something we’d never recommend, but also a film we won’t judge you for watching and enjoying.
