Can "The First Purge" Be the Last Purge? Please?

Let this serve as both a review and a strongly-worded letter of complaint to Blumhouse Productions.  They have utterly wasted over an accumulative seven damn hours of my time via four--count 'em--four of these inexplicably egregious Purge movies.  I've seen some terrific films; I've seen some awful films.  My tolerance for garbage has become increasingly low, but it's this form of human debris that pushes me past my breaking point.

The First Purge isn't only bad enough to be the worse Purge, but is quite arguably the worst movie I have seen in the theater since I invented Theater Worthy Pics.  And that's a list which includes movies like Rampage, Jigsaw, The Commuter, Justice League, Pacific Rim: Uprising, and freakin' Happy Death Day.  Actually--you know what?  I'll apologize for my earlier statement; as the phrase, "inexplicably egregious" might have been disingenuous.  You see, I'm fully able to explain just how bad The First Purge is--while also ripping apart it's three predecessors.  

Much like the franchise, this review gonna be long; it's gonna be brutal; and, man, oh, man, is it gonna be painful.  Unlike the franchise, however, it'll hopefully provide some of you with several minutes of entertainment that is thoughtful, entertaining, thought-provoking, and possibly even intelligent.  To quote The Joker, ''...here...we...go."  

Ironically, it's premise is not one of the proprietary causes of what makes the Purge movies such a fiasco.  The concept of "all crime--including murder--[being] legal for 12 continuous hours" is as conceivable as it is interesting.  Some movies have an irredeemable premise, which means that you can only place so much blame on the movie itself.  So, you see, my issue with these atrocities is not that their roots are moronic, but that an interesting, realistic, and relevant premise was reduced to toilet paper.  Good premises are very difficult to come by, which means that wasting a perfectly fine one is a more punishable offense than making a stupid movie that stems from an equally stupid premise. 

I'm pretty sure these were originally meant to be horror movies, which means that the series as a whole--particularly The First Purge--failed on multiple levels.  I get that it's hard to make a movie that's scary, particularly when basically every horror premise has been done to death.  Horror movies involving possession, creatures, or extra-terrestrial beings are difficult from the start because the fear invoked by them is inherently irrational.  Thus, fantastic horror movies that have become classics like Jaws, Halloween, or Nightmare on Elm Street are particularly brilliant because they cause people to fear sharks, murderers, and their own dreams.  These are fears that are not only rational, but also common.  

Subsequently, a movie based on the fear of anyone being able to murder you with no consequence could have been brilliant, as that fear is at least conceivably rational.  Yet, the first three Purge movies traded the possibility of intelligent fear for copious amounts of cliche, non-frightening jump-scares coupled with gratuitous violence.  This was also the case with The First Purge, but to a far more damning degree.  The First Purge completely gave up on any attempt to even be remotely scary, and instead became an ill-fated attempt at an action flick with bad lighting.  Any "action" or "violence" was outrageously unrealistic and shamelessly stupid.  At least gratuitously violent Tarantino films like Django Unchained or The Hateful Eight are advertised that way.  And are--you know--well-made movies.  

I'm honestly trying to reasonably consider what anyone finds remotely redeeming about the the way these films are made.  It certainly can't be the writing, because the writing is one of the cheesiest attempts at dialogue that I can conceive.  There's nothing more than strict exposition in-between painful attempts at humor, which is particularly apparent in The First Purge.  Plus, for good measure, one character or another will spit out a moronic one-liner that is conceptually and literally irrelevant from the plot.  

But it's not just the dialogue that makes The First Purge such a cinematic nightmare.  It's the random narrative construed with a disjointed series of events that aren't linked by even the slighest causality.  The outcome of a film is supposed to be a series of events with conceptually relevant consequences.  I mean, I suppose you could enjoy The First Purge's narrative; if, for some reason, you like nonsensical scenes that contribute nothing to anything; which are also as poorly made as they are random. 

And I certainly know that the characters or actors aren't a reason people find these movies redeeming.  The Purge may have had Ethan Hawke and the woman who plays Cersei Lannister, but any enjoyment from them begins and ends with recognizing who they are and remembering better movies and shows that they're in.  They also dragged Marisa Tomei into The First Purge, but she must've become a trap actor, because she magically assumed the same level of acting ability as everyone else.  The director must have told the actors to intentionally portray unlikable and irredeemable people, because every character within The First Purge is nothing more than an ill-fated typecast.  I mean, I suppose you could like some of these characters; if, for some reason, you find joy in one-dimensional stereotypical tropes that reduce folks of every race, belief, and social class to an offensive caricature.

It definitely can't be the soundtrack or the score that fans of this movie find to be enjoyable, either.  The soundtrack was complete trash.  I'm not saying that a soundtrack can generally make or break a film, because it genrally doesn't.  That said, an iconic score or memorable soundtrack can turn a good movie into a great one.  Inversely, a terrible soundtrack can flock a bad movie into the realm of becoming a really bad movie.  Such is the case with The First Purge.  There was hardly a song in it that was not a form of overplayed, racebaiting non-music disguised as hip-hop.  I'm not necessarily against all hip-hop, but I am against it being used at every opportunity regardless of whether it completely goes against the tone of the scene.  The soundtrack was as inappropriate for the film as it was annoying.  I mean, I guess I could be wrong.  If you like the soundtrack, maybe you just thought that it seemed approprate because almost all the main characters are black.  Or something.  

I certainly hope it isn't the directing or editing that fans of The First Purge enjoy.  Whenever anyone speaks--for any reason--their face takes up the entire screen.  It's like the director wanted a dramatic, extreme close-up for the opening scene, but the camera's zoom broke, so he just said, "Screw it, we'll just film the entire movie that way."  This was particularly bad during the action (and I use that word loosely) scenes because there was no possible way to know what the hell was happening.  But, to be honest, that wasn't as big a problem for me, because I really couldn't care less.  I mean, I suppose you could like the way this movie was directed or edited; if, for some reason, you like poorly lit, nausiatingly rapid close-ups of nonsense.

I sure hope that was a sufficiently thorough explanation as to why the Purge movies are one of the most painful money-sucking entities I have ever seen.  Although, while watching The First Purge, I felt bad for my best friend next to me, because he had to put up with my gaseous intestines for almost two hours.  But I told him it was appropriate; because, you see, it served as a simile.  Indeed, watching The First Purge is about as enjoyable is being stuck in a closed-off room filled with copious amounts of someone else's excreted methane.

Unless, of course, you're into that sort of thing.

Reviews for this atrocity are way too generous, because it deserves nothing more than a 19%, which means I'd normally send it to the

PAWN SHOP.

But you know what?  Even that would be too generous for this film.  I wouldn't want there to even be a chance of someone else spending money on it.  So what I'd recommend is to take any evidence that it ever existed and do the same thing to it as these movies did to me.  That is, to say, destroy it beyond repair and never let it be the same.