Featuring a multi-cultural inner city cast, and perpetuating black gangster stereotypes of 1970s blackploitation films, the First Purge attempts to explain why people need so many rules (plus law enforcement in order to act like responsible individuals. This series represents mankind in a violent Hobbesian state of nature, pitted against each other in a zero sum game. The evil (mostly white) government has set up a social “experiment” which pays people to harm one another and violate them or kill. The film starts off as a shoddily filmed yawn, with the PC crowd protesting the upcoming violence. The acting is so so in the early parts of the film.
Things start to pick up when the government implants colorful video cameras into the eyes of the contestants, doing surveillance on them, and rewarding them (theoretically since they wind up killed and not able to collect) with cash. It turns out the government (evil white people) want to cull the population. It is not an experiment so much as class warfare or possibly genocide. As the contest goes on , not enough people are participating in killing each other. Therefor, the government inserts mercenaries from private ex military personnel to dress as contestants and go waste everyone. These other bad guys are of course white. There are minority bad guys, who always turn out to have a lame excuse like being poor so they have to do crime, or they are crazy. Remember, only white people do evil because they actually are evil. And remember that black guy drug gangs are really the good guys. And they will be the ones who will save you from ‘The Man’, when all the shit goes down. Gangster guys can just do drugs and run on the treadmill all day. And they will automatically turn into a ninja and they will kill everyone and save you.
If you remember all that , then maybe you can survive the holocaust too! Oh. And don’t forget to listen to ganster rap all day long. And focus on CNN as your main news source. This left wing paranoid fantasy against the right is a bit absurd, though fun at times. One great scene involved two crazy female contestants who had set up a minefield booby trapped with deranged plastic baby dolls. This film was worth the matinee price for that part alone. Overall, there were some great visuals. Besides the latter mentioned, there is an insane black guy mental patient character who kills with syringes taped to his hand (like Freddy 3 classic kill moment) which I also really appreciated. Also noteworthy are the similarities to the video games Manhunt and Silent Hill. A lot of the imagery used in these films is that grainy urban nightmarish style from the late 90s video games that influenced a generation. Manhunt was really controversial , but this film goes over like a Pina Colada. This movie was a little more ‘Hate Whitey’ than the other purge movies, where a white dude saved hella people on one hand. I have to give it a c+. Fuck the man!