Review: 'The Forever Purge' aims for red-meat catharsis, and commentary about xenophobia on the border — but it feels a little too real to be entertaining

Five movies into “The Purge” franchise, with “The Forever Purge,” and what started as a tight little thriller about mob violence and class warfare has morphed into something else: A blood-drenched predictor of things to come.

It’s a stretch to call James DeMonaco — who has written all five screenplays in the series, and directed the first three — an oracle. It requires no clairvoyance, just cynicism and a cursory knowledge of American history, to guess that things can go bad when angry people with guns get a chance to vent their frustrations. If anything, the lurid machinations in “The Forever Purge” feel a bit dated next to what we watched on the news on January 6th.

In the timeline of the series, the Purge — the annual 12-hour night of unrestrained violence, where all crime including murder is legal (though, it’s noted, government officials above a certain level are exempted) — has returned. So has the right-wing political force that spawned it, the New Founding Fathers of America.

So in a Texas town near the Mexican border, various folks get ready to hunker down and ride out the brutality. The rich Tucker family — the patriarch Caleb (Will Patton), daughter Harper (Leven Rambin), son Dylan (Josh Lucas), and Dylan’s pregnant wife, Cassie (Cassidy Freeman) — closes the iron door and window guards of their sprawling house. Meanwhile, Juan (Tenoch Huerta) and T.T. (Alejandro Edda), undocumented ranch hands who work for the Tuckers, hop on a bus that takes them, along with Juan’s wife, Adela (Ana de la Reguera), to a bunker attached to a nearby church.

The 12 hours pass, and everyone emerges from their hiding spots ready to clean up the mess and start a new day. Soon, though, they find that some people aren’t ready to stop the Purge. Fueled by demagogic leaders, social media, a TV network whose name is never overtly mentioned, and their home arsenals, these folks declare the Purge will go on “ever after” — targeting both the super-rich and immigrants.

After some close calls, including Adela getting caught in a contraption that looks like something from a “Saw” yard sale, the Tuckers and their Mexican acquaintances have to join forces to survive the Ever After factions that have overrun many parts of the nation. Their goal becomes survival, and getting to the Mexican border, which — in an ironic twist that’s as subtle as everything else in DeMonaco’s bruising script — is letting in refugees trying to escape the new Purge.

Mexican-born director Everardo Valerio Gout knows his job is to lay the action and violence on with a trowel, and he throws the red meat to the audience with both fists. He throws every action trope into the mix, including some chase scenes that feel cribbed from “Mad Max,” but without the same visceral thrill.

Whatever quick-hit emotional catharsis Gout and DeMonaco conspire to create through the bloody action, as the innocent Juan and blowhard Dylan must learn to kill, the high is brief and unsustainable. It’s hard to watch a fictional dystopia that looks too much like a freshly filmed documentary.  

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‘The Forever Purge’

★★

Opens Friday, July 2, in theaters. Rated R for strong bloody violence, and language throughout. Running time: 104 minutes.