Director: Everardo Gout
Distributor: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment
Duration: 103 minutes
The Forever Purge (Blu-ray) – Movie Review
In 2013 the world was somewhat shocked with the release of The Purge, a movie that played around with the idea of making every possible crime in the book legal for twelve hours, once a year. The movie was quite well-received by its viewers, and because of its initial success, sequel movies were made, as well as a series. Now, the fifth movie has been released on Blu-ray, and it takes things one step further: a neverending Purge. We were quite fascinated by this new release, only to be utterly disappointed with the execution.
The Forever Purge begins with Adela (Ana de la Reguera) and Juan (Tenoch Huerta) fleeing from Mexico, hoping to live a relatively safe life in the United States. Sadly for them, the US blames all of their issues on (illegal) immigrants and decides to reinstate the yearly Purge. This means that for one night per year, people can commit every possible crime without getting in trouble for it. Minority groups are now the new target, and they even have safehouses that are protected by mercenaries, in order to survive the night. When this year’s edition of the purge ends, both Adela and Juan return to their jobs, only to find out the Purge has never ended. There’s a massive group of racist rednecks stating the Forever Purge has begun, and that the land should be cleansed from foreigners.
Truth be told, it’s not that there are real pacing issues with The Forever Purge, it just lacks any interesting content. The director relies on random jump-scares that contribute nothing; while playing it very safely with regular gunplay for the murders that happen onscreen. We realize that The Purge is nothing akin to the Saw series, but everything felt quite ‘vanilla’. It doesn’t help that the characters we are supposed to care for are very bland and uninspiring, and the message of standing up against racism gets lost in translation when the movie violently adheres to stereotypes. It doesn’t really feel refreshing to have the Mexican couple make guacamole in their first real scene together in the movie, to then give Native Americans bows and arrows in a gunfight. We feel like the creators wanted to board the political correctness train, only for them to board it without a valid ticket. We applaud diversity, as well as raising moral issues; if executed properly.
Overall, the acting performances weren’t horrible. The problem with The Forever Purge lies with the characters being overly superficial, giving the cast members nothing to work with to flesh out their characters. The lack of likable characters, who you actually want to survive, also detracts from the quality of the film. The cast members put down a fairly okay performance for the material they had to work with.
The Blu-ray version of The Forever Purge doesn’t come with many extras. You’ll be able to explore roughly around fifteen minutes of behind-the-scenes footage, some deleted scenes, a storyboard, and a theatrical trailer. The movie is somewhat self-explanatory and actually doesn’t need any additional features, as there were hardly any plotholes or special effects worth mentioning. Nonetheless, it’s certainly fun that these small featurettes were added.
Conclusion
The Forever Purge is a boring mess that fails to entertain. While the core concept is still fairly interesting; and playing around with the idea of making the purge a permanent ongoing event is very intriguing, the execution feels off. This new movie fails to deliver on every front, due to superficial characters, an overdose of political correctness, and just very bland action sequences. If another movie is made, we hope things get a bit more exciting again, as this one misses its mark completely.
The Forever Purge (Blu-ray) - Movie Review,
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