In this article, we are going to rank all the Purge movies from the worst to the best. Before I give you my take, here’s what the critics had to say about it over on Rotten Tomatoes. In the last place is The Purge with 38%, in 3rd place is The First Purge with 47%, in the 2nd place is The Purge: Election Year with 53% and in the first place with the greatest score, 57%, is The Purge: Anarchy. Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t review movies, they’re an aggregate, they collect the reviews of a bunch of professional critics and then they provide an answer.
Reviewing the Purge Movies from Worst to the Best
The first movie that we are going to talk about is The Purge. This movie had a great concept that there’s a night where there are no rules or laws nationwide, there are no police. This amazing concept with a pretty good cast when you get Lena Headley and Ethan Hawke is the reason we all loved The Purge movie. Another major role in the entire series was of the Purge mask which gave all the characters their specific identity in the film. The concept was of a home invasion movie that is set up in the world that they created. This way they could tell all kinds of different stories that are unique to a situation where there are no laws and rules.
The director decided to tell a story about something that you can tell without needing it to be purge night because if you’re at your home and you don’t want people coming to your home, you simply stay inside. So the story that they picked to tell made no sense for the surrounding world that they created and there’s nothing you can do to explore the interesting concept when you just do a home invasion movie. It was a movie to me that starts off kind of strong, interesting, intriguing world-building, and then you get into the home invasion party. I wish we were out in the world watching the purge happen.
As it moves into the third act, it just got weird, and then it ends with like people sitting at a table. I do not like the direction that they went with this movie at all. I feel like all of the setup, all the potential of the purge, and this movie was wasted. So for me, it was not an abysmal movie.
Purge Election Year Had Mixed Reviews But the Characters Were Excellent
I was very excited about The Purge: Election Year movie because they got Frank Grillo to come back. There was so much potential to have another solid adventure out in the purge with a great action star in the lead and then just in the basic concept of what they were trying to do with the movie with the idea of the resistance it’s set further along.
The movie revolves around the concept that in the future, people are trying to take down the new founding fathers, which had so much potential once again for a great little adventure inside of this universe of the purge. The execution on this one just really didn’t work for me, and there are several things about it where I think there was just a little bit misdirection. There were maybe too many plot lines going on, so it felt kind of disjointed to me.
Some characters were mesmerizing like a candy girl that wants a candy bar and things like that felt a little bit exaggerated to me. But the character of Brittany Mirable was the best fit for the movie and people loved the character of the candy girl. The Kiss Me Purge mask was the highlight of her character, which gave an intense persona to the candy girl look. I like it when these movies have ideas that explore the possibilities inside of them.
This movie was a schlocky action, horror, hybrid franchise with thrills and jump scares, and crazy insanity. It’s not a political thriller and we don’t need to go that far down that path because it weighs the movie down in a way that it shouldn’t. This movie moved into the third act and cult-like new founding fathers aspect that bogged down some of the fun of being out in another purge with Frank Grillo being a limo guy. So this one comes in third place for me.
The First Purge Was the Best Among the Movie Series
For me, there’s a pretty big jump from third place to second place. I had a lot of fun watching The First Purge. They use the purge universe which is their center of attraction. I loved the story that they told and I got nervous when the studios decided to do a prequel and instead of moving the story forward, they decided to go back and see where everything came from.
They found a way to do that which kind of gave us a new look at the purge. It was a contained environment and it became a kind of national thing that people were watching, and I thought all of that made for some real nice additions to the mythology and a different angle on the material that we haven’t seen in any of the previous movies.
Just from there, I thought some of the characters and the arcs they gave them worked a little bit better than some of the other films because we didn’t necessarily have so many disjointed storylines and they were a little bit closer together. That wasn’t meant to be high art or great cinema, but at the end of the day, it was good horror, action, fun, and it worked well and even the way they developed the story.
Conclusion
Universal moved Halloween Kills, Forever Purge, and more to later release dates. So I decided to review the previous Purge series because we are not getting a new release this year. As we wait for this year’s Halloween, I thought it would be best for me to binge-watch all the Purge franchise and write an article ranking them in order.
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