Frank Grillo Fights to End the Purge in ‘The Purge: Election Year’

Patrick Regan

In 2014’s “The Purge Anarchy,” Frank Grillo staged a one-man battle for revenge. This time around, we’ll watch him protect the one person who stands a chance of ending the brutality once and for all in “The Purge: Election Year.”

Writer/director of “The Purge” installations, James DeMonaco has faced a long road, appearing on the scene as the screenwriter behind Francis Ford Coppola’s “Jack.” The first film was made on a meager three million dollar budget and ended its run grossing eighty million. Three years later in ‘16, “The Purge: Election Year” is a summer franchise beacon, standing proud amongst its larger budgeted counterparts.

The film rejoins Grillo’s Leo Barnes. Years after the events of “The Purge: Anarchy,” Barnes is the current head of security for Senator Charlene Roan (Elizabeth Mitchell from ABC’s “Once Upon a Time”), presidential front-runner and outspoken anti-Purge activist.

The Purge was instituted by a group known as the “New Founding Fathers” as a way of saving a broken society. For one night, all crime is legal and no emergency services will respond to help. Billed as a cathartic release, it actually serves as a vicious method of population control.

The New Founding Fathers, afraid of Senator Roan’s growing influence, plan to have her eliminated on Purge night before she can bring their system crashing down around them. It’s up to Leo Barnes to ensure she survives the night.

America finds itself in an election year as well, although possibly not quite the dystopia of “The Purge.” James DeMonaco wrote the film in ‘14 well before he could possibly have known who the candidates would be, but he admitted that it’s possible to see them in the film. As he told Entertainment Weekly: “Little things drip into you when you’re writing or you’re on set — you’re grabbing from the ether or what’s out there in the press.”

Whether intentionally referencing the real world or not, “The Purge: Election Year” is a dark action-thriller that, in the long tradition of science-fiction, makes the audience understand their own world by seeing it in a fun-house mirror.

“The Purge: Election Year” takes over nationwide theaters on July 1.