If you’ve been following this blog for a while then you’ll be aware of my views of the first Purge film, wherein a rich family have to survive the annual “Purge”, where all crime bar political assassination is legal. If you’re new here, let me sum it up for you: it sucked. So you would probably expect me not to be too enthused about the sequel - The Purge: Anarchy - and you’d be right there as well. But a friend requested I watch it, because he was curious as to what my review would be like of it, and so here we are. Let’s Purge.
So we know how this goes: alternate-future America where all crime is legal for one night a year to keep everyone happy and crime-free for the other 364.5 days; rich people stay in their “secure” (hah!) houses and have “Purge parties”, while poor people spend 12 hours killing or being killed, and it all gets broadcast on TV for the rich people to watch. While the first Purge film dealt with an upper-class family getting caught up in all the poor-killing chaos, the sequel has us follow several people from the lower end of the demographics - a waitress and her daughter, a couple whose car breaks down just as the Purge begins, and a man out for some Purge-sanctioned vigilante revenge - who end up on the streets together and trying to survive against just about every psychopath looking to Purge that night. And believe me, they meet a lot of psychos. During the course of the night this group stumbles across no less than five organised groups and countless solo Purgers, all while actively trying to avoid them.
The filmmakers were obviously concerned that we might not have picked up on the idea that the Purge is a bad thing in the first movie, so they really crank it up in this one. Just about every character who’s not wearing a creepy mask at some point comments about how bad and scary the Purge is, and there’s even a Malcolm X-type character doing webcasts to encourage people to rise up and fight back against the Purge and the government this time around. The film doesn’t even seem to be able to go five minutes without a reminder of how the Purge is being used to cull the lower classes, in fact, and that gets old pretty fast. Yes, the rich white guys in charge have come up with a way to slaughter all the poor minorities and get away with it, thank you Purge, I think we got it. Sure, they hang a stockbroker at one point, but he’s one of the few rich white people we see killed during the night (who isn't actively hunting, at any rate).
There are a great many people holding Idiot Balls in Anarchy as well, such as when three of the four people rescued by our Frank Castle-alike (we’re never given his name in the film, and he’s played by Frank Grillo so the name fits) are surprised that a heavily-armed man driving a bulletproof car around on Purge Night does, in fact, have Purge-related business to do. About the only character with any sense, in fact, is the teenage daughter Cali, who spends most of the film calling out other characters on their stupidity and/or dickishness. The “revelation” that the government really is using the Purge as cover for killing the poor people (oh yeah, spoiler alert) seems to come as a surprise to most of our protagonists, but not really to us, but the filmmakers apparently thought we wouldn’t see that coming either, so maybe they think we have a few Idiot Balls as well. There’s also far too much stuffed into the film; too many stories that would have been far better served in their own movies, perhaps, rather than shoehorned into this one.
Another problem I have with the film is the effects. CGI blood has become more and more common in TV shows and movies in recent years, but for the most part the effects look at least competent. In The Purge: Anarchy they look like they’ve been photoshopped on as an afterthought. Bulletholes don’t even look attached to the body the bullets are supposed to be coming out of, and I swear I saw at least one dead person look more digitised than anything else. It smacks of cheap, rushed work - the end result of trying to rush a film out to ride on the tailcoats of a previous film’s publicity.
So after all this you might have come to the conclusion that I didn’t really like The Purge: Anarchy. And well… you’d be mostly right. It’s better than the first Purge, I will give it that… but then again, so is cold semolina. However, there’s a grand total of three characters I like in this film, which is one up on the original, and the film does attempt to tackle some of the important questions raised by the first movie, albeit in a heavy-handed, over-simplistic manner. Personally, I’m still holding out for a third Purge film where all the rich families sold those crappy security systems in the first movie get together next Purge and air their grievances with the security company (yes, that part still bothers me, why do you ask?), but in the meantime, Anarchy at least attempts to move things along rather than keep them in a microcosm. Just don’t expect to be surprised by anything in the movie.
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