"For one night only, America invites you to its annual tradition."

Filmologhy Rating: 2.33 out of 4

When she was a young girl, Sen. Charlie Roan survived the Purge night that horrifically took the lives of her family members. Now some years later, she is a presidential candidate and is determined to end the Purge once and for all. However, her opponents are not so found of this plan and plan to assassinate her on Purge night. It is now up to Leo Barnes (Frank Grillo, and main character from the second Purge film), who is now her head of security, to keep her alive for the next 12 hours at all costs.

Brief overview of the Purge films…. The first film I thought had an interesting concept and plot. However, due to many issues, the film doesn’t hold any value and really isn’t that good. The second one called Purge: Anarchy I thought was a better. It actually had a decent character that you can get behind (Leo Barnes) and asked some deeper questions. Just because you have the right to purge, should you? Would it really make everything better in the end or would it just leave you feeling hollow still. Adding on to this, we get to see an anti-purge movement starting because as we have learned from the first 2 films that the purge is really just a way to have population control and to kill off a large portion of the poor demographic. So after the third film, I was hoping that they would go into the political side of this story and when I found out this was true, I really did look forward to this movie.

Purge: Election Year is once again a step up from the previous film. While this wasn’t a huge leap or anything, it is moving forward once again. I found that Election Year was by far the most engaging film from the series and had the most substance to it. It actually had some depth and a purpose to it instead of just mindless killing for the majority of the plot and trying to survive. If Sen. Charlie Roan can survive this night, then maybe there will be some changes and we can once and for all end this horrific night. This gives off a real sense of urgency and importance, something that wasn’t there in the first two films. Helping give off this sense of urgency was Frank Grillo and Elizabeth Mitchell and some others who gave good performances. This by far was the best put together cast so far in the series. They had a surprisingly good chemistry and a friendship that made the film seem more relatable and also believable.

Now this movie is far from perfect…. It is really over the top in some aspects. A lot of the violence from the Purgers became too cartoony and fake. It didn’t have a scary factor to it anymore. They went from being brutal in the first and second film to very silly and almost musical and whimsical in Election Year. I feel like this movie wasn’t also that scary and was more of an action thriller. While I didn’t have too much of an issue with this, I feel a large portion of its viewers will be disappointed. Lastly, they brought religion into this film which will definitely have a lot of people up in arms. For some reason they connected the Purge to Christianity and that it was the Christian thing to do. If they connected it to any other religion, people would be up in arms over this. They should’ve dropped the Christianity connection and just made the purge to be its own religious beliefs as American Fundamentalists or Idealists of just left it political all together. And lastly, apart from the main group of people, there was a lot of really poor acting from the side people. They were hilarious at times even. Given the poor acting and the poor dialogue, it can be extremely cheesy at times. 

Overall, this movie is far from perfect but still was entertaining for me. I was able to look past these flaws and still have a good time. Each film has been a step up and if this is the last one they make (maybe a 4th?.....) it will be a good conclusion to the series. The series has had a lot of ups and downs.... well mostly downs. However like I said, this film was the most engaging because of the plot. Something that I could really see happening if something like this ever did happen (which it obviously wouldn't.)

Rating: Rent It 

-Nick