The Purge: Election Year

Let us now praise creepy masks and class warfare! Over the course of two movies, producer Jason Blums future-shlock horror franchise about a government-sponsored holiday of lawlessness has gone from yuppie siege thriller with an intriguing premise to pulpy-as-fuck social critique; the leap from 2013s original installment to 2014s highly politicized The Purge: Anarchy is damned near quantum. For this threequel, director James DeMonaco and co. double down on the populist anger and throw in a powderkeg Presidential election to boot, pitting blonde Senator Charlie Roan (Elizabeth Mitchell), whos campaigning on a strict anti-Purge platform, versus a blustery Trump avatar. (To be fair, her opponent is really a Frankensteins monster composed of spare parts from Mitt Romney, John McCain and various GOP silver foxes he might as well be called R.E. Publican.)

Meanwhile, a room full of scheming old white men, i.e. the Powers That Be, want her out of the way. If that means hiring some racist skinhead mercenaries to off the potential POTUS on Purge night, hey, a status-quo-loving elites gotta do whata status-quo-loving elites gotta do.

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Before the commencement klaxons go off, however, we meet the rest of our heroes: Joe (Justifieds Mykelti Williamson), the owner of a local deli that doubles as a neighborhood town hall; Laney (Betty Gabriel), a former gangster alpha female who doubles as a paramedic; and Marcos (Joseph Julian Soria), a Mexico City transplant that happens to be a crack shot when shit goes down. (Immigrants: They get the job done.) And yes, Frank Grillo our generations Lee Marvin, if were lucky returns as Leo Barnes, the previous movies badass now working security detail for the Senator. In other words, when theres politician-protecting, arm-breaking, neck-stabbing and self-inflicted bullet removals to be done, hes your man.

Once an attack forces Roan and Leo into the streets, and the rest of the movies good-guy factions join up with them to make it through the next 12 hours, Election Year breaks out the maniacs in blank-faced masks and baroque B-movie touches a killers car covered in white Christmas lights, a guillotine sideshow, a Pit and the Pendulum-style booby trap thats become the franchises aesthetic stock in trade. It also offers up the most diverse ensemble casting this side of the Fast & Furious flicks, an ecstatic church-and-state mass that plays like a Fox News wet dream, some genuinely disbelief-suspending plot devices, and the sort of camp-nip quotables (The original founding fathers are about to fuck up the new founding fathers!) designed to further rile audiences already drunk on hootin, hollerin bloodlust.

Mostly, though, what The Purge: Election Year delivers is a sort of come-one-come-all chance to rage against the machine. Despite the left-leaning ideology embedded into the series DNA, its still a bit of a political Rorschach test: You can look at Sorias hero as an example of pro-immigration tendencies, and see the roving packs of Euro murder tourists as pandering to the xenophobic crowd (Foreigners coming to our country, intones a news reporter, to kill!). And for all of its protagonists anti-Purge liberalism, the story sure gives a lot of ammo to the pro-Second Amendment, the only way to handle a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with gun crowd.

Rather, the films real currency is simply a nonpartisan free-floating us-vs-them anger, in which a put-upon underclass finally gets payback and a one-percenter upper class finally gets its comeuppance. You can be a pissed-off Tea Partier or an Occupy advocate and find something here to stoke your fat cat hatred; either way, catharsis is doled out not in a dusk-til-dawn homicidal free-for all but two harmless hours in a theater. Election Years only real stance besides be sure to vote in November is that America is violence. God bless the U.S.A. God save us all.