The First Purge (Dir Gerard McMurray, 1h 37 m)

Horror, it is fair to say, is a genre that almost by ins very nature, reflects society, from its very beginnings, with Frankenstein warning of  the results of scientist seeking to become God, to the cinematic, with Romero's Dead series reflecting everything from consumerism to lack of communication to racism, to longer form series, such as the American Horror Story series using everything from female sexuality and empowerment, to reality tv, whilst films such as Hereditary and A Quiet Place add new elements to traditional ideas.

The Purge series, of which this is the fourth film, acting as a prequel to explain how the increasingly outlandish annual custom of 12 hours of unpoliced, unprosecuted violence, came to be widely accepted, started out as a critique of gun violence, and mass shootings under the Obama administration-despite its attempts at political allegory, however, the previous three films took a hamfisted, and increasingly ridiculous approach to the Purge itself, from the Bateman-lite of Henry, the first film's villain, to a veritable army of pro-and-anti purge forces, to the completely ridiculous premise of the third film.

The First Purge now jumps up a gear in the wake of an increasingly volatile atmosphere between law enforcement and black youth in America, best typified in the Black Lives Matter movement, the election of Donald Trump, whose election slogans and paraphernalia have been co-opted in the publicity and marketing of this film, to rather cheap effect, and the concerning rise of the far/alt right in the vanguard of Trump's election campaign and presidency.

Certainly, in the first third of the film, the first theme, of black youth and impoverishment being treated as a tool to start, and sustain the Purge is developed to a decent degree; with the first purge being a small-scale experiment on Statten Island, thus we are introduced to an almost exclusively African American cast, from gangsters determined to look after their own during the Purge led by Y'Lan Noel's Dmitri, to a critique of the toxic effects of gang culture upon young black men, in the vengeful form of Joivan Wade's  Isaiah, to the attempts by his sister, Nya, (played by Lex Scott Davis), to keep her community together both before and after the purge.

In some of the film's best scenes, there's a chilling precision to how the poverty, anger and frustration of the poor, downtrodden, and mostly Afro-American community is weaponised, most notably in the figure of deranged and scarred drug addict Skeletor, who, much like the previous film's central antagonists, seem to be a mouthpiece through whom the purge itself speaks, a figure who acts as messenger and instigator of the first Purge.

However, as with the previous films, once the Purge itself starts, albeit slowly, and not as the shadowy representative of the New Founding Fathers first imagined, so the film begins to struggle-the carefully constructed elements of the community downtrodden, victimised and turned in on itself starts to waver, then finally collapse. By the time that the Purge is fully underway, with shady paramilitary, led by a bizarrely fetishistic clad man with a leather bag on his head, multi-coloured Klu-Klux Klan members, with flamethrowers, no less, fairly unsubtle Neo-Nazi bike gangs, who shoot up a church to little emotional effect, and a colourful carnival of Mad Max rejects, all of whom are either offed in roundabout fashion, or simply disappear off to do unpleasant things not-on-screen The First Purge is little more than another action movie, which filters to to its Die Hard lite finale.

For all its political window-dressing, its media riffing on the car crash happening in real time at the centre of American politics, red hat, slick-hair fascists, lying and revisionist government suits, its brief references to the government flooding the area with guns, or the sly inclusion of Russian mercenaries to influence American opinion, The First Purge does exactly what the first three films did-build up an interesting premise to an unexciting climax, rinse, enlarge, repeat.

Like other horror movie series, from Paranormal Activity to Nightmare on Elm Street,The First Purge has now stretched its one idea to breaking point; we reach the point, unfortunately, where The Purge itself needs to be purged.

Rating: Neutral