103 min | R | July 2, 2021 | Universal Pictures
The annual night of legal murder ends at dawn. This year a movement decides it should never end and turns its guns on immigrants, the poor, and anyone they call un-American. The masks come off and the satire goes with them.
America’s borders close and the Purge does not end at dawn. A white-nationalist movement decides the annual night of legal murder should run forever, and they hunt anyone they deem un-American. Adela and Juan, two Mexican immigrants working a Texas ranch, must flee north into the country they fled to. The Forever Purge takes the franchise’s blunt premise and points it at immigration, white supremacy, and the people who do the work nobody else will. The thesis sits right on the surface. The Americans become refugees and run for the Mexican border that has opened to take them in.
Ana de la Reguera plays Adela with a coiled wariness that reads as survival instinct learned long before this night. She has seen organized violence before and she recognizes it faster than anyone around her. Tenoch Huerta plays Juan as a ranch hand whose skill with horses earns grudging respect from a boss who would never invite him to dinner. Josh Lucas plays Dylan Tucker as the rancher’s son who carries quiet prejudice he never examines until the purgers come for his family too. Will Patton plays the Tucker patriarch Caleb with a worn decency that the script uses to mark the difference between casual bigotry and the genocidal kind.
Everardo Gout directs from a script by series creator James DeMonaco, and he stages the violence with a grimy daylight ugliness that the earlier films avoided. The purge spilling past dawn means the masks come off and the killing happens in flat Texas sun. Gout shoots the El Paso sequences with handheld immediacy that turns a city street into a war zone. The production design covers the purgers in mismatched tactical gear and crude symbols, the look of an insurgency assembled from hardware stores. The sound design favors gunfire and engines over score, which keeps the tone closer to a siege than a slasher.
The Forever Purge wants to be a horror movie about America eating itself, and it has the right target. The problem is that it never finds anything to do beyond chase and shoot. The commentary arrives in dialogue rather than situation, and the characters announce the themes the action should be dramatizing. DeMonaco has made this point four times now, and repetition has sanded the satire down to a chase across the desert. The premise still cuts. The movie around it does not.