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The Purge: Election Year Movie Review

The Purge: Election Year is a 2016 action thriller film directed by James DeMonaco and starring Frank Grillo. It’s another mediocre entry in this fun, but disposable franchise.

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“I want my candy bar“

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Police Sergeant Leo Barnes is tasked with protecting the presidential candidate Charlie Roan after she is targeted for death on Purge night. This is one of those Hollywood movies that are too on-the-nose with their politics that of course take the swipe at Republicans, racists etc. We all know who are the usual targets, so then we cannot be surprised when they target them every single time in every single movie that goes political.

With that being said, for a film called Election Year it’s not too overtly political and nowhere near as annoying as I feared it would be. Yes, those elements are still pretty much there, but they aren’t hugely important to the story that ultimately remained a story about gun violence as its prime issue. But again the movie like the entire franchise never went anywhere with this theme, ending up being nowhere near as sophisticated as it thinks it is.

My main issue here was the characterization. For a film that includes a huge cast of characters, very few people here got a meaningful arc, if any at all. Frank Grillo is definitely memorable in his action sequences once again, but his character continues to be boring and underdeveloped. The senator also was forgettable, though they tried their hardest to make her backstory emotional. Joe and Marcos as characters representing minorities are fine, but again underdeveloped.

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The Purge: Election Year is too overstuffed in both the number of characters and the plot points that succumb to the same all shoot and run scenario that gets repeated so often that it becomes numb very quickly. The action sequences are well executed and this franchise turning into an action thriller franchise and abandoning its horror roots was ultimately a good thing for it as those moments can be fun in their over-the-top nature, but the movie needed more unique scenarios, plot points and characters to elevate its simplistic premise properly.