This film balances the murderous and political story lines with pure dystopian grace.
The third Purge film digs deeper into the political lore of the purge which is run by the seemingly corrupt government and sees Grillo return as a bodyguard to politician Senator Charlie Roan (Elizabeth Mitchell) who finds herself a prime target for being publicly anti-purge after being the only survivor of her family to survive a previous purge.
This time we get to know slightly more about Grillo’s Sergeant; last time around he didn’t even have a name. Set two years after The Purge: Anarchy, Leo is now firmly in the anti-purge camp and he must keep the Senator safe at all costs. This comes after the pair are double-crossed by government officials so that the senator who is a threat to the white house can be shut down. Permanently.
The film lasts 109 minutes, making it the longest Purge film yet, the film is perfectly paced. You won’t wonder how the nearly 2 hours flew by but you want to be clock watching wishing for it to end.
The trailer for both the DVD release and the cinema release focused on the beginning of “murder-tourists”, these are tourists who come to America for the opportunity to kill and cause havoc but the hype was more than misleading as they amount to nothing more than a handful of scenes. (And all die in a rather unremarkable fashion)
The flaw in The Purge: Election Year is the exact same one that badgered the previous two movies. People in Purge films go from normal psychotic mass-murderers and gun-wielding assassins in the time it takes for the countdown to finish. In a world where all crime is legal all people seem to want to do is murder each other, it would be nice to see other crimes committed so that the film could take a different turn instead of being typical of the last two movies – Arson, severe child abuse, rape, espionage, high treason, drug dealing, human trafficking, severe cases of fraud. Any of these twists would have given the film a bit of well need, and bloody, face lift.
The Purge: Election Year DVD and Blu-ray release date was set for October 4, 2016 and it doesn’t take a genius to work out the correlations between the political turn in the purge and the current political climate of the United States. The US Presidential Election 2016 date landed on the 8th November. The characters also seem very similar to those of Mrs Clinton and Mr Trump.
The Purge trilogy feels like an unusual combination of the first two movies but they say that three is the magic number, but only time will tell if this is the end for the Purge franchise.
The Purge: Election Year is available on DVD and Blu-ray on December 26th from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment.