Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Forever Purge’ on VOD, in Which the Franchise Trudges on, Maybe Even Beyond the Confines of its Concept

Now on VOD, The Forever Purge is a title that sounds like a threat. For a while, franchise creator James DeMonaco said this, the fifth film in the Purge series was going to be the last, which makes sense, since it ups the conceptual ante by making the 12-hour lawless free-for-all an open-ended killathon. That’s a major problem. Think about it: if Murder Christmas was every day, would Murder Christmas still be such a special occasion? But fear not, devoted Purgies — DeMonaco reversed course, and recently confirmed that he’s writing himself out of a corner and working on a sixth movie. The series will truly never ever end! But let’s get back to the task at hand here: The Forever Purge ropes in The Secret: Dare to Dream star Josh Lucas and Army of the Dead’s Ana de la Reguera to anchor the cast, and hands the reins to first-time feature director Everardo Gout for what’s sure to be a delightful analysis of the state of American social politics. Now let’s see if this stuff sticks to our ribs.

THE FOREVER PURGE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Juan (Tenoch Huerta) and Adela (de la Reguera) clamber through a pitch-black sewage tunnel leading from Mexico to Texas. Are they aware that ’Merica has reinstated the Purge after an eight-year hiatus? If so, things must be pretty bad in Mexico. If not, then they’re in for a treat, aren’t they? Ten months pass. Adela works in a meat-packing plant, and Juan is employed by some rich-ass ranchers. It’s the day before the Purge. One of those ranchers, Dylan Tucker (Lucas), is trying, and failing, to break a horse. Juan steps in and whispers the bronc to the ground, which really chafes Dylan’s sack. Sure seems like he doesn’t think highly of people who aren’t English-speaking Caucasians. His daddy Caleb Tucker (Will Patton) runs the joint, and he hands out envelopes with cash to his employees — their “Purge protection bonus.” Caleb shares a moment with Juan. He tried to raise Dylan to be a “Proud American,” but he acknowledges that he might not have done a very good job. So it goes.

With the slaughterama only hours away, Adela walks down Main Street and watches as a couple of yokels carry some new gear out of the gun store, which is apparently having a Purge sale. (I hear the Purge is the perfect time to snag a new mattress at rock-bottom prices!) A sharp eye would notice a scary skull logo on buildings and cars here and there around town, and Adela’s eye is sharp. The logo sure looks like an amalgamation of a white-supremacy sigil and something from the cover of a Five Finger Death Punch album. What’s cooking here? A little civil unrest stew, baby!

Meanwhile, Dylan, his pregnant wife Cassidy (Cassidy Freeman), his sister Harper (Leven Rambin) and Caleb hole up in their cozy manse. One press of a button and steel shutters lower over the doors and windows on the house and stables. They’ll just hole up for the next 12 hours and wait out the Purge in their heavily fortified privilege-bubble. Elsewhere, Juan and Adela use the “Purge protection bonus” to buy a spot in a heavily guarded facility, alongside many other Mexican immigrants. AND SO IT BEGINS: The Emergency Broadcast System issues the warning and all that, and all the country’s sicko creeps take to the streets for a little murderin’. Adela heads to the roof to get an eyeful and have some light convo about the weather with one of the guards. Interestingly, she picks up an assault rifle to scope out some horrific shit happening inside the window of a PURGE PURIFICATION truck driven by some curiously well-organized white folk, and shows that she knows how to handle some heavy artillery. Thinky-guy emoji. Make that TWO thinky-guy emojis.

And then the night passes and it’s all over and everyone just goes back to work, cruising past the corpses in yards and blood-soaked sidewalks and vandalized buildings. It’s quiet. Too quiet? Too quiet. It’s only a matter of time before: A) Adela stumbles into a strange torture trap, B) Disgruntled gentlemen target the Tuckers for being rich, C) Juan and fellow ranch hand T.T. (Alejandro Edda) attempt rescues, D) a news reporter is gunned down during a live shot and E) principal characters begin showing skills roughly the equivalent of special forces soldiers. In a country that’s gone so gol durn awry, it was bound to happen.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: There are probably better comparisons to make, but The Purge Forever occasionally elicits that queasy feeling you get when watching a somewhat plausible future American dystopia play out to extreme ends, just like The Handmaid’s Tale does.

Performance Worth Watching: Like everyone else in the cast, de le Reguera is stuck with a nothing character, but she shows enough badass action-star moves to make us hope she’s someday cast as Jane Wick.

Memorable Dialogue: “I don’t know if I know what that means anymore – ‘proud American’.” — Caleb struggles with the concept of patriotism in the year 2049, and also the year 2021, even though the movie was made in 2019, and supposed to be released in 2020

Sex and Skin: None. TBTNTBPTF: Too Busy Trying Not To Be Purged To F—, of course!

Our Take: It’s tempting to say The Forever Purge presents an all-too-feasible future America where senseless violent racist ideological numbnutted peabrains attempt to take control of the country by attacking the U.S. Cap- er, I mean, extending the Purge. And for a moment or three, it works, screenwriter DeMonaco stirring troubling white-supremacist iconography and other signifiers of modern-day hates and fears into his Purge soup, bringing the series up to the sociopolitical sensibilities of 2019, when the movie was made, and then very much accidentally sort of resembling events that happened here in 2021. In that sense, the film is miserably prescient.

But that only holds up on a superficial level, because the movie is ultimately some thin soup. DeMonaco essentially dangles political catnip toys in front of us, hoping we’ll take a swat. Immigration, gun control, racial tensions, white supremacy, class divisions — all just tools for provocation used to spread a thin veneer of quasi-intelligence atop yet another medium-effective action-thriller in which a group of average civilians run around a lot and are suddenly dead shots with a 9mm.

Which is too bad, to be honest. Gout is a halfway-decent action director, and manages to sustain tension reasonably well in a few sequences, and conceptually, there’s an opportunity here to Say Something About America. But DeMarco sure seems to want us to take all this seriously, because the tone is too grim and witless. If he leaned heavier into satire, there might be opportunities for pointed comedy, and maybe even a better excuse for all the gory throat-slashings and bullets-to-the-head — and it’d further fortify the ironic impact of a certain third-act development. The movie’s straight-facedness tells us exactly what it is: exploitation. There’s a scene late in the film when, after many scary chases and bloody skirmishes, the pregnant woman says she doesn’t know if she wants to bring a child into this violent world, and it’s unintentional comedy, like tossing a lime Skittle into a bowl of prison-grade gruel. That’s what passes for character development and big-picture perspective in this movie, which is technically proficient and expeditiously paced, but ultimately dumb as a brick.

Our Call: SKIP IT. On one hand, The Forever Purge is reasonably suspenseful and effective genre filmmaking. On the other, it’s an ugly display of violence littered with social-commentary red herrings. Any chance it had of being something different for the franchise is wasted.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream The Forever Purge