The First Purge arrives as the fourth film in a franchise that had, by 2018, already worn its premise down to a stump. The hook was always the same: one night a year, all crime is legal. Gerard McMurray directs this one, the first entry James DeMonaco wrote but did not direct. It is a prequel, which means the film has to explain how the annual Purge started. It does that, and then it runs out of things to do.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures.
Staten Island as the Trial Ground
The experiment is confined to Staten Island. The New Founding Fathers of America, the political party that has taken power, offer residents $5,000 to stay on the island for twelve hours. The pitch is that citizens will release their inhibitions in any way they choose, including murder. The NFFA says the goal is to push the crime rate below one percent for the rest of the year.
The party outfits participants with contact lens cameras to monitor all activity. It puts tracking devices in them to know if they try to leave. This is the detail the film keeps returning to and never quite uses. The cameras are a surveillance mechanism, and the film treats them as set dressing.
Dmitri Cimber Stays Behind
Y’lan Noel plays Dmitri Cimber, a low-lying gang boss and businessman. He tells his associates they will not be leaving the island, because moving his money and product will draw too much attention. He tells them to stay in a safe house and lay low. One of them, a drug dealer called Capital A, disobeys and joins the Purge.
That decision is the film’s first real hinge, and it happens off to the side. Dmitri is the closest thing The First Purge has to a center, and Noel gives him a stillness the rest of the movie lacks. He is not a hero by temperament. He is a man protecting an operation, and the film is better when it lets him be that.
Nya Charms and the Church
Lex Scott Davis plays Nya Charms, an anti-Purge activist and Dmitri’s ex-girlfriend. Her brother Isaiah, played by Joivan Wade, is a rookie who gets attacked and injured by a drug addict named Skeletor. Isaiah goes to Nya for treatment. As people flee Staten Island, Nya joins her friends Dolores, Luisa, and Selina in a church to wait out the Purge.
The church is the film’s best idea and its most wasted one. Four women, one room, twelve hours, and a city outside that has agreed to stop pretending. The First Purge cuts away from them too often. When it comes back, the tension has to be rebuilt from scratch.
Skeletor and the Viral Video
Rotimi Paul plays Skeletor, a crazed drug addict who talks about his desires to purge and unleash his hatred of others with an NFFA employee. Skeletor commits the first Purge murder, and the video recorded by the NFFA goes viral.
This is where the film’s politics get sharp for about ten minutes. The NFFA watches the footage spread. The party observes that all crimes taking place are minor, unlike the expected violent ones like murder. That gap between what the experiment was sold as and what it produces is the most interesting thing in the movie. The First Purge does not follow it anywhere.
Witness the birth of an American tradition.
Marisa Tomei as Dr. May Updale
Marisa Tomei plays Dr. May Updale, the sociologist and architect behind the experiment. Patch Darragh plays Arlo Sabian, the NFFA chief of staff. Both are asked to carry the film’s institutional villainy, and both are given almost nothing to do with it.
Tomei is the most accomplished actor in the cast and she is on screen for a handful of scenes. The film never lets her argue for the experiment in a way that would make it dangerous. Sabian is a functionary who announces things. The NFFA is determined to get the results they want by any means necessary, and the movie states that rather than dramatizing it.
A Prequel That Explains Too Much
The First Purge runs 97 minutes. It is an action, horror, and thriller by genre, and it is at its weakest when it tries to be all three at once. The action is competent. The horror is mostly implied. The thriller mechanics — the tracking devices, the cameras, the promise of payment — are introduced and then abandoned.
The film’s job is to show the origins of the annual Purge, a twelve-hour period in which all crime in America is decriminalized as a means to reduce crime for the rest of the year. It does that job. It shows the experiment, the payment, the first murder, the viral footage. What it does not show is why anyone would keep doing this. The horror of the franchise has always been that the Purge became a tradition. This film is supposed to be the birth of that tradition, and it treats the birth as a bureaucratic rollout.
What the Franchise Loses Without DeMonaco
McMurray is a capable director. His film looks better than its budget should allow, and the Staten Island locations give it a texture the earlier entries sometimes lacked. But DeMonaco’s scripts have always had a mean, pulpy energy, and that energy is thinner here.
The First Purge is the fourth installment overall and the first not directed by DeMonaco. That fact matters more than the credits suggest. The series had a consistent voice, and this film does not replace it with anything. It is a prequel that answers questions nobody was asking, at the expense of the questions the audience came for.
The Forever Purge followed on July 2, 2021. The First Purge grossed over $137 million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing entry in the franchise. That number says more about the brand than the film. Audiences showed up for the idea. The idea is still good. The execution here is not.
The Verdict on The First Purge
The First Purge has one strong performance, one strong setting, and one strong sequence. Noel’s Dmitri holds the screen. Staten Island is a real place with real geography, and the film uses it. The viral video sequence is the only time the movie’s politics and its plot occupy the same scene.
Everything else is scaffolding. The supporting cast is large and mostly undifferentiated. The NFFA is a villain without a face or an argument. The experiment’s rules are laid out and then ignored whenever the script needs a chase. The film ends where the franchise began, having added a backstory and subtracted a reason to care.
This is a prequel that mistakes explanation for depth. It tells you how the Purge started. It never makes you feel the moment it became inevitable. The scariest thing about the original premise was that people voted for it, kept voting for it, and built a holiday around it. The First Purge shows the first vote and none of the appetite.
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