Thursday 18 August 2016

The Purge: Election Year ... Sacrificial lamb

 A QUESTION that has always perplexed me about The Purge trilogy is people staying put in country and not attempting to flee the Purge before it starts.
   The three films make no mention of this, but it posits in the The Purge: Election Year that blood-thirsty foreign tourists are willing to risk their lives to kill others with impunity.

    The Purge (2013) is about a top-selling security system salesman being unable to accept that Purgers are besieging his heavily-fortified home in a rich enclave. It's also about his white family acting as saviours for a homeless black veteran escaping Purgers.
   The saviour theme continues in The Purge: Anarchy (2014), when an army sergeant (Frank Grillo) seeking revenge goes out of his way to save a Latino single mum and her gregarious daughter.
   The film shows blacks and minorites hitting back at rich whites who are killing for the pure joy of it. The sight of a dead white trader hung outside a building is also an expression of Americans giving vent to their anger about financial losses.
    In writer-director James DeMonaco's The Purge: Election Year, the sergeant, Leo Barnes, is the
Leo Barnes (Frank Grillo) and Charlie Roan
 (Elizabeth Mitchell) in a tense moment.
security chief for presidential candidate Senator Charlie Roan (Elizabeth Mitchell), who is campaigning to abolish the Purge against pro-Purge candidate Minister Edwige Owens (Kyle Secor).
   Barnes is doing his best to keep Roan safe on Purge night, but he will need the help of former gang members Joe Dixon (Mykelti Williamson) and Marcos (Joseph Julian Soria), and Laney Rucker (Betty Gabriel). Dixon and Rucker are black, and Marcos is a Mexican-American.
   It's relevant to note that Roan is a white campaigning to end the gross injustices perpetrated against minorities during the Purge. This can be seen as an extension of what the salesman and the sergeant did for minorities in the first two films.
   But avid filmgoers know that whites need minorities to die for them in their quests. (Spoilers ahead). Roan is presented as a sacrifice for the New Founding Fathers in a Catholic church, but it's Dixon sacrificing himself to save Roan that makes him the sacrificial lamb in this film.


 
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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