Review: The First Purge

***The following review contains spoilers. Proceed at your own risk.***

I know critics love presenting themselves as consummate, well-traveled experts on a series, but I spent the past week — wait for it — binging the Purge films, and found them ultimately satisfying when experienced in sequence. The original film feels unfairly maligned by most critics, when it’s really a rather inventive proof-of-concept whose success qualified funding for the rest of the (better-funded) sequels. Billed as home-invasion horror, you can tell that creator James DeMonaco had a lot of ideas, and a lot of heavy-handed political allegories to cram into Ethan Hawke’s hairline.

Now we’re ready for the SEO-unoptimized The First Purge, a prequel which offers a look at the inaugural evening of the government-sanctioned program based on J-Zone’s 2000 track, “No Consequences.”

The First Purge sees writer DeMonaco and newcomer Black director Gerard McMurray going all-in with that political commentary. Joining Brian DePalma’s Sisters as a hostile anti-advertisement for Staten Island, the film demonstrates the purge as a GOP-led experiment designed to cull the Black and brown poor, under the guise of offering a medicinal “freeing violence” to the psychologically repressed.

Oh yeah, and if you take part in the experiment by simply spending the night in Shaolin, you get a $5,000 stipend (with bonuses available for bad behavior), which a struggling single mom in the film describes as a “life-changing” amount of money. I really felt that line, and it began to draw me into The First Purge’s madness, this idea that the government was thumbing the scale from jumpstreet in hopes of calling their experiment a rousing success.

At the center of this catastrophic night are a few well-drawn characters, all of whom are Black and brown, all of whom turn in rewarding, well-earned performances. Isaiah (Joivan Wade) and Nya (Lex Scott Davis, watch her star soon rise) are brother and sister, with the former foolishly joining the purge’s paid ranks in secret while his sister leads protest rallies against the experiment on judgment night. Marisa Tomei plays the mother of the movement Dr. May Updale, who observes the proceedings from a high-tech surveillance lab. The apparent humanity she eventually reveals is probably the most tone-deaf portion of the film, but she essentially represents scientific failure when distanced from the suffering it seeks to cure.

And then, dearest readers, is Y’lan Noel, who most of you know as Daniel from Insecure. A drug-dealing kingpin-turned-purge hero, Noel occupies the Leo Barnes role, but handily outdoes Frank Grillo’s enjoyable performances in the second and third films (he’s basically an off-brand Punisher). Initially, The First Purge looks to plumb the murky irony of a drug dealer being protective of his neighborhood…and then it’s like, screw it, and transforms him into a balls-to-the-wall, gun-toting hood Rambo-meets-Blade in a bloody tank top so quickly that you don’t even have time to question it — you just bask in it. I felt like I had a front-row seat for a new cinematic action hero, and all I know is that I need more Y’lan Noel putting foot to ass, as soon as possible.

That hero turn is smart, because a lot of the imagery in The First Purge is crushingly dreadful. Here are some snapshots for your perusal: a project building hallway full of dead residents, gunned down by sanctioned racists. A church sanctuary destroyed by racists, most of its inhabitants slaughtered with automatic weapons (smartly, this is only shown from the outside, proving that the Purge series retains a meager sense of tact). A frothing-at-the-mouth crack-addicted anime villain of a human being named Skeletor (no, really) who can’t wait to slice and dice, stomping around the entire film like a scenery-chewing T-Rex.

This array of shocking visions may be too much for certain audiences to endure, and I would completely sympathize with that response to it. Most of it isn’t played purely for puerile laughs, but hardly any of it is rightly earned, either. There’s a bizarre non sequitur, the briefest of soundless scenes, that shows a group of white police officers having just beaten a Black man, watching him squirm painfully in a baseball field in slow motion. An aerial shot leads to the lit scoreboard behind them, reminding viewers of that $5,000 in blood money being offered to Staten Islanders. It’s a scene that says, “Look, poors, this is what you got paid for,” as if anybody watching the film needed to be reminded of its deception concept.

Watching these scenes, I fully understand that they’re supposed to make you angry, supposed to hurt you, but they’re also queasily reminiscent of incoming news stories, to the plight of impoverished people of color in the present day. It’s manipulative, and galling, and feels a little too easy to be considered a maverick move or sly profundity.

The First Purge knows this, though. That’s why you then get Y’lan Noel strangling a nazi in a sambo mask to death in a project stairwell. It’s all a shaky grasp for balance in such a teetering seesaw of an experience but, if you’ve already made it that far, you’re not going to want to look away.

I found my own steady hold early on in the film, and the horror trope of horrible decisions are at least somewhat qualified by the fact that this is the first night of the experiment, where no one knows what to expect. Purgers even get government-issued contact lenses designed to record the actions of participants, visually transforming them into shadowy Terminators stalking the streets, an obviously chilling image that yet remains effective throughout. While the movie poster implied a heavier reference point to 45 (it gets but one straightforward joke in), the heavier ramifications of the plot describe what most people always knew about the purge: it’s a structured classicide and genocide, rendering Ethan Hawke’s laborious speech to his kids in the first film an example of disinformation accepted readily as fact by those who benefit the most from its spread.

The First Purge might not be a nuanced political commentary or an artful polemic, but as a modernized John Carpenter-inspired debacle of urban chaos? The system works.

About the Author

Leonardo Faierman was born in Buenos Aires, raised in Queens, on the playground was where he planned most of his schemes. Since then he’s plowed a jagged path as a writer, editor, podcaster, comic creator, and mostly benevolent malcontent in New York City. Leo’s 1/5th of the long-running podcast @BlackComicsChat, 1/2 of horror podcast @TheScreamSquad, staff writer for Screen Rant, film editor for the independent sci-fi monthly newsletter Narazu, and generally has words all over the interwebs, but they’re frequently gathered up on Twitter at @LeonardoEff.