The Forever Purge movie review (2021)

Our heroes find a sympathetic ear in the form of Juan’s employer, Caleb Tucker (Will Patton). Tucker is a unicorn: a wealthy but political liberal Anglo rancher who volunteers, while being terrorized by a white leftist extremist and his goons, that white Americans are living on stolen land, and that his tormenters’ refusal to admit that is a sign of their own unexamined privilege. “You got no right to complain about the very system that you’re supporting,” he says. His son and heir apparent, Dylan Tucker (Josh Lucas), is initially presented as a fairly straightforward racist, but later, the movie makes a point of suggesting that his attitude (that the races should stick with their own kind, an idea Juan seems sympathetic to) is at least less horrible than roving white supremacist gangs’ desire to kill anyone who doesn’t look like them. (“Speak English,” they keep ordering brown-skinned people, sometimes while whole city blocks are on fire.) The plot eventually leads to a racially mixed bomber-crew assortment of characters, including Dylan’s pregnant wife Cassie (Cassidy Freeman), running for the Mexican border to escape American violence (an admittedly clever reversal of how this narrative typically works; Canada is also offering Americans asylum for a limited time only, as long as they come unarmed).

We’re better than this, “The Forever Purge” seems be saying. But are we? Native Americans and the descendants of slaves would disagree, But that’s beyond the scope of this review, and apparently not within the purview of DeMonaco’s expanded universe of societal collapse and “Children of Men“-style extended tracking shots through mass carnage on main street.

The result is a mixed bag. You might appreciate how “The Forever Purge” sharpens things up until it can be said to speak directly to what has happened in the United States under Trump (the “let’s just say all the hateful stuff loud and proud” aspect, primarily), while at the same time noticing that once again, as always, the franchise is stirring free-floating anxiety and rage into a stewpot and dipping into it every few minutes to serve up a tasty bit of violence, never focusing its vision to the point where it stings in the way that, say, George Romero’s zombie films did. At least there are a few grimly poetic moments, as when a neo-Nazi prison chained in the back of a police wagon listens to the array of guns popping during their drive and identifies each by the sound it makes. “Homegrown music from the heartland,” he says, leering in ecstasy. “That is American music, motherfucker!”

The performances are better than the material deserves—particularly those of De la Reguera and Huerta, whose reactive closeups have a silent-movie expressiveness; and Lucas, who once again proves that he’s willing to play deeply unlikable characters without signaling to the audience that he’s a nice guy offscreen, actually. The final third of the movie, which introduces nasty Nazis and Nazi-adjacent baddies only to swiftly kill them off, feels a bit too much like a videogame with actors.

Now playing in theaters.