The Purge: Election Year (R16)

The Purge, 2013’s low-budget home invasion horror hit, found its breakout star in The Purge itself: an annual 12-hour bloodbath of government-sanctioned mayhem. In this dystopian nearfuture, the New Founding Fathers of America (NFFA) have instituted the contained lawlessness in order to keep crime, and the population, in check. The 2014 sequel, The Purge:

Anarchy, liberated audiences from the confines of a single home and let loose into the streets of murderous chaos.

That film’s breakout star, the brooding Frank Grillo, an American version of a taciturn Jason Statham tough guy type, is a Purge angel of sorts. His character, Leo, is back in The

Purge: Election Year, which is the biggest, baddest, berserkest

Purge so far. Writer/director James DeMonaco has written and directed all three films, maintaining a consistency of tone and style, including bits of humour and cartoonish weirdness among the grim, dark and terrifying possibilities.

These films are overtly political, but the heart of The Purge trilogy is ultimately deeply human. Our heroes fight to save individual lives among the mass death.

They face a classic activist conundrum: Is it worth your values to take up the tools of the master? One can’t be against the Purge and also purge, even if you’re purging oppressors.

The question of the film is not a political one but a moral, ethical, humane one. The Purge: Election Year provides all that on its wild ride of blood-soaked anarchy. TNS