Now here is a sequel I didn’t see coming. In case you missed last year’s strange little dystopic Ethan Hawke thriller The Purge, here’s the premise shared by its bigger, badder, open-concept follow-on: It’s the year 2023, unemployment is under 5%, crime is minimal and people are happy. This is because in 2017 the New Founding Fathers instituted the “Purge”, a 12 hour period during which all crime is legal. Citizens are encouraged to “unleash the beast” and reap their fill of wanton violence once a year. Emergency services are suspended.
Before clouding the issue with facts, let’s get one thing straight: This film is neither as violent nor as scary as everybody who’ll never see it seems to think. It’s not torture porn, it’s not a horror film, it’s not even especially violent except in concept. (I mean, it’s not rated G, but Sabotage was gorier–and that’s just Arnold playing bad cop.)
Whereas the first film pulled the low-budget trick of taking place almost entirely within a single house, The Purge: Anarchy aims higher: the streets of LA. Some good law-abiding folks get caught outside or otherwise find themselves thrust into the fray, team up with the requisite badass (played über-gruff by the excellent Frank Grillo) and must survive ’til morning. Just about every thriller/horror/1980s crime-scare film trope is in here, including evil-looking baddies straight from central casting who amble casually whilst stalking their prey. (This doesn’t make a huge amount of sense, since in a true free-for-all the first thing to go, I’d imagine, is the luxury of posing.) Gotcha-type faults like this abound, of course, but admittedly this film sets a pretty cool mood as the ragtag protagonists traipse around deserted streets lamenting that all this mayhem is government-approved.
For all the likely chatter about this film offering a reductio ad absurdum of the gun-debate zeitgeist–and in spite of its almost comical thematic ambitions–it adds nothing to established conversations on gun violence and income inequality.
Director James DeMonaco–who I bet my blue ICEE was the kid who mashed all the buttons in the elevator–gleefully tosses social issues into this VitaMix, and the result is a strange brew with as few insights as answers. It’s honestly hard to tell just how satirical this movie is trying to be. The largely new class-warfare angle doesn’t help, beginning with the government secretly culling the poor and culminating in an (intentionally?) riotous send-up of the 1% “unleashing the beast” in tweed and suede and riding pants. The end credits don’t clarify much either. Are we in on the joke? Is DelMonaco? Who knows.
To perhaps state the obvious: Cheat days don’t work on my diet and they wouldn’t work with murder, because ending a defined period of sanctioned bloodthirst demands a monk-like onset of self control from precisely the sort of deranged homicidal mob least likely to display it. Similarly, this film never attempts to explain why criminals happily sit out the other 364 days to do their business precisely when everyone’s most prepared. Oh well.
Thanks to its premise, Purge: Anarchy has a few unique problems. Time seems to move too quickly, for one. Although we follow the protagonists’ actions in what seems like real time, we’re told that 5, 7, then nearly 12 hours have elapsed. And the movie shares some ho-hum problems with its genre-mates, too: Badass Grillo eschews tactical reloads in gunfights, which doesn’t really seem all that tactical of him until you realize he never runs out of ammo in the first place. Gangs of Scary Bad Guys largely ignore one another but show unreasonable, almost fetishistic fixation on the protagonists for no real reason. And so on.
Purge: Anarchy has its positives. The safe-house scene is in a sense the scariest one, a nice nod to the (admittedly premise-killing) reality that most murderous impulses are motivated not by blind random bloodlust but instead involve people with grudges. And it tries so very hard to say something. But what? Since I have no answer, how about a quote: “For those releasing the beast tonight, we wish you a successful cleanse.” Yeah, pretty much.
Haus Verdict: More thematic hubris than Victor Frankenstein at slam poetry night. Better than the first film, which isn’t saying much, and not the social commentary it thinks it is–but not half as bad as I feared.