Review #353: The Purge: Election Year (2016)

October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #26 - The Purge: Election Year (2016)

[I don't think this is streaming anywhere for free, but it is available for rental and purchase on most platforms.]

So, I have an embarrassing story to tell: I tried watching this movie earlier today and I got about an hour in before I realized I wasn't watching The Purge: Election Year from 2016, I was just watching an average day's news coverage from 2025. (Ba-dum tiss.) Joking aside, I was really afraid this movie wasn't going to be enjoyable at all after the first portion of it focuses so much on the caricatures of how bad we thought politics could get ten years ago; it almost feels quaint at this point. But in the end I was pleasantly surprised, though I do have a lot to complain about.

For the record, I don't think I've ever seen a Purge movie before; I checked to make sure whether this movie was a continuation of a previous movie and the consensus seemed to be that this series is mostly stand-alone stories, so all I had to know going in is that these movies take place in a fictionalized United States where the country has instituted one night every year when all crimes are legal (and they always feel the need to specify that murder is included; more on that later) so the bulk of each film revolves around a group of characters trying to survive the night while people all over are trying to kill anyone they can find.

In this particular Purge movie, the main plot follows a senator who is trying to run for president on a campaign of ending the eponymous Purge, while her opponent is a member of an organization that has essentially turned the Purge into a religion. Naturally, some hired mercenaries spend the Purge trying to assassinate her, while she and her bodyguard are trying to escape. Meanwhile, the secondary plot follows the owner of a convenience store whose Purge Insurance suddenly hiked up its rates so he has to take the defense of his store into his own hands- and he comes to a certain senator's rescue when he notices her being accosted by some murderous thugs.

I'm going to try not to spend too much time complaining about how stupid the idea of the Purge is, but I do need to talk about that a bit. It seriously seems like the writers of this movie think that murder is either the only crime people refrain from, or that it's the most harmful thing a person can do (or maybe the writers just think that the audience isn't interested in seeing anything more creative than that, I don't know). The impression I've gotten (both from this movie and from similar complaints I've heard about other Purge movies) is that there's little to no time spent talking about how people view any other kind of crimes, or how the legality of a crime that's not as instantaneous as murder is dealt with. (For example: if you steal someone's car on Purge day, that's legal. But if you're still driving it around a week later, can you be arrested for that? Or does it legally become yours?) Considering this movie deals at least nominally with politics, there's a LOT of illegal stuff that goes on in politics that has long-lasting effects. Which part of, say, stealing an election can you do during the Purge to make it legal for the rest of your term? I don't know, because this movie doesn't seem to think in any sort of terms beyond "If I assassinate my political opponent, it will be legal" as if the legality of assassinating a political opponent is the only concern a presidential nominee would have.

Also, another small thing that this movie does with the Purge that I don't understand: I don't know if this is part of other Purge movies, but there's some lip service paid to the idea that certain people are "exempt" from the Purge, because in this movie, that "exemption" is revoked. I think the idea is that normally, killing a politician is still illegal during the Purge, but this time it's not (hence the assassination plot)? First off, doesn't that defeat the entire purpose of the "all crimes are legal (including murder)" that gets brought up in the trailer for each Purge movie, if actually only SOME murders are legal? (And again, how does this interfere with other crimes? Can you steal from a politician? To go with my previous analogy, if you steal an election, is that considered a crime against your politician opponent or is it a crime against the people? Again, either the writers are supremely stupid, or they think the audience is supremely stupid. I don't know which.) But just the fact that they call it an "exemption" is really weird. An exemption usually means there's a law, and one person doesn't have to follow that law. Except in this case, the "law" is that laws don't apply, so an "exemption" from the law where laws don't apply means that... laws DO apply? So is it the politician that is exempt (meaning you can't kill them) or are people exempt from not being allowed to kill politicians? If it is the politician that's "exempt" from the Purge, does that mean the politician can or can't commit other crimes? This is so confusing and all I'm trying to do is parse a basic definition of a word that gets used multiple times in this movie. I literally don't think anyone on the writing staff put even one paragraph of thought into it, or they'd have used a different word.

One more thing (partly to do with how stupid the Purge is, and partly just how stupid some common tropes are): Can we please do away with the trope of "If you kill him, you'll be just as bad as he is"? That's often completely false. The villain in this movie wants to use the Purge to rid America of the poor people that are draining its resources. The heroes want to kill him so they can get rid of the Purge, thus stopping the senseless murder of tens of thousands of people. To quote the Gus Fring meme, "You and I are not the same." I understand the senator not wanting her opponent to get killed because killing him will make him a martyr, but again, it's not like the only options are murder or setting him free. Sure, killing him will make him a martyr. But what if you like, cut off his hands? Nobody's going to vote for the guy with no hands. Or, kill him and make it look like he died to autoerotic asphyxiation. Planting evidence is legal during the Purge. Tampering with a crime scene is legal during the Purge. Using his phone to send nudes and bestiality to everyone on his contact list is legal during the Purge. Those are just a few ideas off the top of my head and I haven't been living in the Purge for twenty years; the fact that the characters literally have no idea how to stop this guy's political momentum except by killing him shows an utter lack of imagination, and it makes everything else seem really dumb by association.

I know I've spent a lot of word count complaining about this movie but overall it was actually pretty good. I have more issues with it, but the characters are believable, the plot moves along at a nice clip (even if the movie is about half an hour longer than it needed to be), and there's some clever twists and turns in here. If it weren't for the fact that the basic backdrop of the Purge seems so incredibly stupid, I'd be tempted to watch some more of these movies; we'll see once October is over.

Overall Rating: 7/10 Obnoxiously Large Circular Saws

When Satire Becomes Reality: When this movie came out in 2017, the tagline on its poster was "Keep America Great", likely referencing the Make America Great Again slogan used by then-president Donald Trump (and also because the movie is about the bad guys wanting to keep the horrific practice of the Purge while their opponents want to end it). But then three years later in 2020, Trump used "Keep America Great" as his actual slogan- at first glance I would assume his campaign marketers didn't realize that was the tagline for this movie about fascist murder, but then again, this was the same presidential campaign that tweeted a video where Trump was confidently inserted into the place of Thanos, the genocidal villain of the Marvel Avengers series of films, so who knows.