“The Purge: Election Year” imagines that, right now, laws are being ignored, people gun each other down with impunity and the death toll is horrendous. It’s too bad the title “Chicago” was already taken.
Chicago, though, has for nearly a century been tightly controlled by a party that bears little resemblance to the Catholic neo-Nazi Tea Party- and NRA-lovers who are portrayed in the “Purge” movies. This ruling class has decreed that on one night a year, everything is legal, especially murder.
The audience for horror movies (young people, blacks and Latinos) is made up of Democrats, and “TP:EY” assumes they’ll delight in a horror movie that contains several rants about the depravities of insurance companies, pauses in mid-bloodletting to reflect on the electoral importance of Florida, and features as a presidential candidate a liberal woman senator (Elizabeth Mitchell) who talks like Elizabeth Warren but looks like Jenny McCarthy. It all amounts to a bid to become the one scary movie of the year to be shown at the Democratic National Convention, which would make it a horror show within a horror show. (The DNC would insist on removing the line “There’s a whole bunch of Negroes coming right this way, and we’re sitting here like a bucket of chicken.”)
Though it imagines devout Catholics holding a midnight Mass each year to celebrate human sacrifice of society’s neediest people (the exact opposite of Catholic dogma), I would never dismiss “Purge 3” as just a ludicrous political allegory. It’s also a ludicrous thriller. Writer-director James DeMonaco’s main tactic, when not coming up with dialogue like “Run. Fast,” is simply to have bad guys blown away by good guys who keep sneaking up behind them.
Still, I admired one detail. The Elizabeth Warren character advises her Occupy-type friends not to kill the man running for president on the pro-Purge ticket, not because murder is wrong but because “he becomes a martyr — we lose.” For all of the movie’s ham-handed satire of conservatives, it is unintentionally dead-on about how liberals think.