Is Purple Hearts as bad as people say?

Purple Hearts has been out on Netflix for a couple of weeks and I had no interest in viewing it because it looked like garbage from the trailers. Then I saw that it had garnered the highest number of views for Netflix in all of 2022 so I became intrigued. In advance of watching, I read a lot of leftist hate on this movie saying it was “military propaganda” but I also read quite a bit of content from current and former Marines that the movie was terrible from a military point of view. So I had to know – is it as bad as they said? Are the views strictly hate watches? Or did liberals hate it for the usual reason that its not woke enough for them? 

The Conservative Critic asks: Is it entertaining? Does it have artistic/intellectual value? Is it liberal propaganda? 

Conservative Critic Meter Check: Purple Hearts 

Overall Rating: Worst movie I’ve seen of 2022 and one of the worst ever – Watch it

Purple Hearts was a bonafide mess. The premise (or one of many premises) is that a liberal bartender/aspiring musician and conservative Marine meet and decide to get married out of convenience before falling in love despite their differences. Blue heart + Red Heart = Purple Heart which is also a play on military terms. If that premise wasn’t enough to churn your stomach, the execution is even more painful. 

The political undertones are extremely shoehorned and poorly researched even for hollywood. The ideologies espoused from the two leading characters manage to be shallower than bumper sticker politics but also confusingly misassociated with the respective parties. The rest of the absolutely mind bogglingly packed full plotline makes little to no sense including a major injury healing in a matter of days, a drug dealer (maybe?), free rent and meteoric rise to pop stardom. There seems to be no tangible connection to the initial set up of conflicting political values and the rest of the film outside of some absurdist liberal dog whistle flags hung on the liberal woman’s apartment. Also there are diabetes, family problems and dead friends. It’s also kind of a musical. This film has it ALL. 

The film is confusing, illogical, poorly acted and poorly conceived. It is not even close to as good as the made for TV Disney Channel franchise from which its leading lady hails (Sofia Carson of Descendants).  

Despite being an absolutely embarrassingly terrible film with no remote connection to actual politics, the military or reality, the left actually took it super seriously and got very offended.

Is it entertaining? 

Rating: So bad it’s actually a riot

The film kicks off insane and keeps going the whole way. Starting off in a divey bar with an unnecessary and certainly unasked for alt-pop performance of ‘Sweet Caroline’ by leading lady character Cassie played by Carson. Enter the group of Marines led by our leading man Luke played by Nicholas Galitzine (that one terrible Amazon Prime Cinderella) and the story commences. From there it’s just a string of nonsensical dialogue, decision making and cartoonish character development intermixed with explosions, fist fights, medical emergencies and extremely frequent musical performances of questionable merit. 

The pace is actually pretty quick because the movie shoves so much into so little time. None of it is good but all of it is so joyously bad it’s actually pretty hilarious and would make a phenomenal drinking game. Purple Hearts has the rare and beautiful quality of being so tremendously bad it’s fun again. Especially since in the wake of the film’s criticism the leading actors have staunchly defended the material meaning they are unaware that they were making trash. Usually about half-way through production the cast and crew figure out the movie is going to suck so it becomes a bit more sentient and a bit less pure in its state of garbage. In this case, Purple Hearts has a rare lack of self-awareness which makes the enjoyment of the catastrophe all the sweeter. 

Does it have artistic/intellectual value? 

Rating: Appears to have been written by an AI programmed by a 15 year old girl on the debate team from the year 2012

Everything about this film was bad from its conception, to its construction to the performances. It was so without merit that I wonder if it was actually written and created by a robot who was never allowed to speak to a human being but instead only read angsty teenage political Facebook posts from the Obama era. And maybe was allowed to do a very cursory google of “Marines.” 

To begin with, I don’t really care how much the leading lady wants her pop career to take off. To shoehorn an inane original score poorly performed by a ridiculously named band (The Loyal) is offensive to the senses, to audiences and to intellectual integrity. There was no place for the at least half a dozen musical performances in this film and if anything they will have harmed Carson’s future as a singer. 

Second, the development of the characters as politically anything was extremely poor and as if the author (or robot writer) had never met either a conservative or a liberal. The liberal girl was running around like I DON’T PAY TAXES! Liberals love taxes because they think they’re social equalizers. The conservative was like COMPLIANCE IS IMPORTANT. Conservatives do not like rules. The political issues are also just extremely dusty. 

Additionally so many plot lines are picked up and dropped like they’re nothing. There is a drug addiction history but then like debt relatively unrelated to drugs? Both characters have weird drama with their families that never really gets explored. They have medical issues that come and go as they please. It makes no sense. 

But the dialogue is really the cherry on top of the trainwreck. At one point the liberal girl goes “go big pharma” in deadpan indicating that she hates “big pharma” and this is supposed to be something a human person would say allowed to a pharmacy clerk. At another a Marine (not the lead) said “lets go kill some Arabs” without an ounce of irony. The characters’ words vomit a bunch of childish platitudes that never seem to rely on the conversation so much as exist in their own space. 

There is nothing remotely redeemable about the crafting of this film. 

Is it liberal propaganda? 

Rating: The lefties took this movie so seriously 

The film is absolutely leftist in that it has the most shallow understanding of what politics are but it feels so deeply entitled to espouse that understanding vehemently. Even though it’s supposed to be balanced, the lefty is definitely hailed as more right than the “right wing” characters (which never actually do or say anything in-line with conservative values). 

Further, the left media who hated this movie took it actually so pathetically seriously. They’re calling the film “racist” and “military propaganda” which is hilarious because the film clearly paints the blatantly racist characters (killing arabs et al) as being bad people. And it has no connection to anything positive or even remotely realistic about the military. So if it is military propaganda it’s perhaps the worst propaganda I’ve ever seen. And if it was white supremacy it’s perhaps the least effective I’ve ever seen. 

Further these leftist outlets actually think the lefty character Cassie in the movie is not an embarrassing hyperbole of a human being which is LOL. She wears t-shirts with tired slogans like “the future is female” and she dangles BLM flags over her balcony and yells at people she doesn’t know while also struggling to afford her insulin even though its established she hasn’t been paying rent and insulin is definitely covered by Medicaid (lefty outlets excuse this because when dealing with insulin paperwork can be hard. Mmmkay).  

Conclusion 

Purple Hearts is absolute garbage that is not, despite leftists taking it weirdly seriously, actual military propaganda. Worth watching for the laughs.