Review: "The Purge: Election Year"

Despite the title, “The Purge” isn’t an overtly political take in its third outing into a nasty dystopian future where people are allowed to murder and rape each other one night a year to vent their collective spleen.

There is indeed a presidential election going on, with the leading candidate a member of the New Founding Fathers of America, who wants to preserve the Purge as a quasi-religious way for citizens to rid themselves of their sin and wanton urges -- sort of preemptive confession and absolution, but with violence instead of penitence.

Christ spilled his blood for our sins; now let us spill others’ for the ones we haven’t committed yet.

The good candidate who wants to do away with the purge is Charlie Roan, an idealistic young Senator played by Elizabeth Mitchell. Eighteen years ago she was a victim of the Purge, losing her entire family, and now wants to do away with the day of infamy once and for all. She points out that most of those killed are poor and minority, claiming the NFFA is doing it simply to ease the burden on welfare rolls.

There’s definitely a one-percenters-versus-the-rest-of-us vibe to the Founding Fathers, who are uniformly white, old and patriarchal as all get out. If you can’t figure out who’s supposed to be who in this configuration, then a red and blue electoral map towards the end spells it out for us.

Still, this film is about bloody mayhem first, with any sort of coherent political message a distant second… or seventh.

The first “Purge” movie fell more in the horror/psychological thriller camp, as a single family was stalked inside their fortress home. The second and now the third ones are purely cathartic action flicks, with Frank Grillo as Leo, a tough but virtuous cop who gets caught up in the killing frenzy.

I liked the first two movies well enough, different as they were, but “Election Year” grows tedious at times. Like the last one it features a thrown-together group of folks just trying to survive the onslaught, who end up banding together to take down the nefarious leaders of the Purge -- giving them a goodly taste of their own medicine in the process, of course.

Mykelti Williamson plays Joe, owner of a tidy little deli/convenience store who’s determined not to see it go up in flames. He acts as both comic relief and the blue-collar voice of reason, and gets most of the best lines in the movie -- courtesy of writer and director James DeMonaco, the man behind all three movies.

Joe’s employee, a persevering Mexican-American immigrant named Marcos (Joseph Julian Soria), turns out to have some useful skills picked up during the drug wars down in Juarez. He’s also got a friend (Betty Gabriel) who runs a volunteer ambulance on Purge night, but used to be known as a champion nicknamed Little Death on the wrong side.

Edwin Hodge plays Dante Bishop, leader of upstart rebellions who oppose the Purge, but adopt its tactics. And Terry Serpico, who looks like Anthony Michael Hall’s malevolent twin, is chilling as the leader of some white power mercenaries.

“The Purge: Election Year” replicates the experience of the previous movies well enough (especially the last one) without really adding any new layers or expanding this world. There’s some disturbing images cooked up for their own benefit -- purgers dressed up as bloody Abraham Lincoln and Lady Liberty, for instance -- but there’s nowhere left for this series to go.

Review: "The Purge"

"The Purge" is a pretty dumb movie, but it goes about its business in a fashion that is not without intelligence and skill. It starts out with an allegorical premise, about a dystopian America where people are legally allowed to kill each other one night a year. But then it dives into familiar action/horror movie tropes while the audience spends the last half yelling at the people onscreen not to behave like total ijits.

Personally, I think writer/director James DeMonaco should've taken a more intellectual and dramatic approach, something like "Gattaca," which also happened to star Ethan Hawke (a frequent collaborator of DeMonaco's). This movie instead opts for boo-gotcha scares and fist-pumping takedowns of bad guys -- but at least it embraces this dumbed-down role instead of trying for a wishy-washy hybrid.

It's the year 2022, and the U.S. has been taken over by a political leadership that calls itself the New Founding Fathers. Their ethos is very heavy on religiosity, but it's more of an Old Testament version with lots of smiting and wrathful vengeance.

One night a year for 12 hours, all laws and public protection are suspended, and people are free to kill, maim and otherwise inflict their pent-up savagery on each other, without consequence. The idea is that while they talk a lot about God, the populace also recognizes its inner demons. Instead of confession, they let their sins out for one wanton night of orgiastic purging.

Most people barricade themselves in their homes and watch the action on television. James Sandin (Hawke) understands this, and makes a very nice living selling high-end security systems to wealthy types like himself. Wife Mary (Lena Headey) is also onboard, though their children are uncomfortable with the reasoning behind the mayhem.

Zoey (Adelaide Kane) is a pouty teen made poutier by the fact her dad disapproves of her older boyfriend (Tony Oller). Charlie (Max Burkholder) is morose and brainy, building a roving surveillance robot out of old toys that will come in handy later.

The Sandins are settling in for a comfortable night behind the protection of their steel-shielded doors when a homeless African-American man (Edwin Hodge) comes begging for mercy from the band of purgers chasing him. Soft-hearted Charlie shuts down the security and lets him in, and a brooding standoff ensues with his pursuers.

The purge crew is not the usual movie collection of illiterate rednecks, but well-heeled prep school types who see chasing down the dregs of society as not just their right, but a civic duty. They wear sinister Guy Fawkes masks, except for their charismatic leader (an excellent Rhys Wakefield), whose patriotic/pious fervor burns luridly brighter.

There are a lot of potential intriguing jumping-off points here, from the rich-vs.-poor underbelly of the purge system to the racial overtones that remain largely unspoken -- and I mean that literally; the black guy seeking sanctuary utters a total of about a dozen words.

But DeMonaco elbows these notions aside in favor of obvious but effective scare tactics. "The Purge" has an eerie claustrophobic feel, underlined by the director's tendency to keep his camera right up in people's faces. I lost count of the number of times somebody was about to die, their would-be killer leering over them with a gun or blade, and at the last second something intervenes.

There's a better movie to be made using this concept, but the one they did make isn't awful.

Review: "Red Dawn"

Like its predecessor, “Red Dawn” is a bunch of silly, jingoistic claptrap – but it’s decently well-done claptrap.

The 1984 original starring Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen and C. Thomas Howell was most famous for being the first movie released with the new PG-13 rating (“Dreamscape” followed five days later), and for being emblematic of the rah-rah patriotism of the Reagan era. The Soviets and their allies stage a surprise military takeover of the U.S., but are ultimately beaten back by a ragtag group of teenage guerilla fighters.

Since the Reds are mostly gone or gleefully practicing capitalism these days, how to approach a remake? Originally, screenwriters Carl Ellsworth and Jeremy Passmore cast the Chinese as the heavies. But then somebody remembered how many movie tickets get sold in China, so a post-production retooling turned the North Koreans into the bad guys.

(“Red Dawn” was actually shot more than three years ago and shelved until the studio honchos figured out what to do with it.)

Now, there’s no denying that North Korea remains a bad actor on the global stage, constantly threatening warfare and firing off test missiles. But former leader Kim Jong Il was a comical figure known more for bluster than any actual capacity to wreak havoc. Indeed, the impoverished, isolated country can’t even feed its 24 million people without coerced food assistance from the international community.

And these are the nefarious villains we’re supposed to believe bring America to its knees?

A montage of news clips sets the improbable stage, with the financial instability in the EU handcuffing our friends across the pond when North Korean launches some super-secret pulse weapon that shuts down our power grid and communications. In Spokane, Wash., the townsfolk are astonished to see paratroopers descending upon them, setting up blockades and shooting those who don’t comply.

The main baddie is Captain Cho (Will Lun Lee), the local prefecture in charge of running the area. Cho and the rest of his soldiers are presented as generic bad guys, which tempers some of the illogic of a North Korean invasion. But it also renders them as mindless automatons waiting to be blown away by the good guys. The original movie at least presented a Cuban soldier with some depth and empathy.

As to those good guys, they’re a fairly standard-issue bunch. Jed (Chris Hemsworth), the leader, is a little older than the rest, a Marine veteran of Iraq who’s constantly having to whip his hot-dogging little brother Matt (Josh Peck) into line. Matt endangers one of their missions to rescue his girlfriend Erica (Isabel Lucas), who was captured and put into a reeducation camp.

Josh Hutcherson plays Robert, the resident hothead, Adrianne Palicki is Toni, a soft girl who grows tough and pines for Jed, and Edwin Hodge and Alyssa Diaz are expendables. It’s the usual collection of actors in their mid- to late-20s playing 17, with the notable exception of Connor Cruise. As Daryl, the son of the mayor who collaborates with the occupiers, Cruise gets to have a few conflicted, emotive moments.

Calling themselves Wolverines after their high school mascot, the troupe transitions from shaky escapees to badass killers in record time. A 5-minute training montage is all that’s needed, and soon the North Koreans have a bona fide uprising on their hands.

It’s reasonably thrilling stuff, though rookie director Dan Bradley is an ardent devotee of the Shaky Cam School of Action Filmmaking. Car chases and fisticuffs are reduced to virtually indecipherable rides in a high-speed blender.

But Bradley and his cast hit the right emotional crescendos, with an end result that feels decidedly less lunk-headed than the original. For goofy escapism, you could do worse than this "Red Dawn."

2.5 stars out of four

Christopher Lloyd is co-founder of The Film Yap.