“The Purge: Election Year” is the capper to the trilogy no one saw coming, the third film in a series written and directed by James DeMonaco, and if you’ve been following along since the first movie, then you will be a little surprised to see the scope of this world opened up even more, and now a rather complete picture has been painted in a very visceral manner, with the thematic elements of class warfare and wealth inequality become the driving force behind an insane premise for a movie, let alone three of them.
The basic premise was barely laid out in the first movie, in which Ethan Hawke played a guy who installed security systems in the homes of people who could afford to barricade themselves up during Purge Night, the one night of the year in which all crime is legal for 12 hours, in an effort to let people “get it out of their systems” so that they would be cool to each other for the other 8,748 hours of the years. His character quickly discovered even his family wasn’t safe, as a bunch of psychopaths broke into their home and terrorized them all. The second movie drops this character and picks up with a new guy, who was going to use Purge Night to kill the guy who DUI-manslaughtered his son, but instead wound up saving people out on the streets and not going through with the murder. In this second movie, it is explained that people suspect the Purge was a tool by the government to eliminate the impoverished portions of their constituency. Continue Reading …