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The First Purge Movie Review

The First Purge is a 2018 dystopian action horror film directed by Gerard McMurray and starring Y’lan Noel. It’s another serviceable, but forgettable Purge movie.

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“It tastes like old man ass“

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The New Founding Fathers of America decide to test a sociological theory and allow everyone within Staten Island to vent out their aggression for 12 hours. But things get unexpectedly out of control. This movie functions as a prequel to the entire series as it’s set in 2014 before the events of its predecessors. This was a sound idea, but the execution is far from great.

The experiment was well explained and interesting, but the dialogue could be quite cringe-worthy and overly simplistic. The main issue of these movies and especially this particular sequel is the political commentary, which is way too on-the-nose. The movie has that self-important tone to it throughout, which made it both ludicrous and highly annoying.

Lex Scott Davis and Y’lan Noel are quite memorable and I really liked their characters, but others failed to make any impression on me and the overall characterization in the series continues to be very slight. The actors did the best that they could with such poorly written roles.

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The First Purge is at its best when it’s focusing on interesting action set pieces and it is at its worst when it’s focusing on that frustratingly simplistic commentary and satirization. The cinematography is excellent and quite striking at times while the movie’s directing and score are also pretty good. It’s a fun movie at that is at times genuinely thrilling, but it was thoroughly lacking in characterization and script departments.