Last year’s twisted and efficient home-invasion thriller The Purge was the victim of its own concept and some unavoidable audience exhaustion. The fundamental idea was absurd but also a b-movie goldmine, envisioning a near future in which a national holiday called “The Purge” legalizes all (read: most) crimes for 12 hours every year, supposedly turning the other 364.5 days into a utopia by encouraging ne’er-do-wells let off steam on psychopathic Christmas. It certainly doesn’t hurt that The Purge also keeps the lower class population down, because they can’t afford to armor their houses or buy fancy weapons to protect themselves.
The image of streets running red with blood while regular citizens act out their Grand Theft Auto fantasies is a disturbing and fun one, but also one that never really came across because the first The Purge confined all of its action to one affluent family besieged in their house. It only seemed to damage The Purge’s reputation further that audiences had simply begun to tire of home-invasion thrillers by the time the first movie was released. Although it made plenty of money (it didn’t hurt that it barely cost anything), the general consensus was that The Purge was the right idea done the wrong way, playing like a cheap straight-to-video sequel of what was, at heart, a bigger and wilder story.
Whether returning writer/director James DeMonaco is actively responding to the criticisms of the first Purge or finally making the movie he wanted in the first place (or simply couldn’t afford), I can’t say. What I can say is that The Purge: Anarchy finally satisfies, expanding on the world of the original while pumping it full of colorful villains, creative action sequences and macho gristle. It’s a lean, efficient and pessimistic dystopian thriller in the tradition of early Walter Hill and John Carpenter classics like The Warriors and Escape from New York; not as good of course, but certainly of a piece.
The annual Purge is coming and Frank Grillo (Captain America: The Winter Soldier) has souped up his car, strapped on weapons and left the house in search of revenge. But his path intersects with a young married couple whose car broke down in the wrong place at the wrong time, and a mother and daughter who were dragged from the questionable safety of their home by heavily armed, heavily armored, suspiciously well-organized hit squads. Grillo uses his never-explained tactical training to rescue them but ends up dragging them through the streets of Downtown Los Angeles, repeatedly delaying his own chance to “purge” in order to save their lives from one maniac after another.
DeMonaco stages The Purge this time as a live-action stealth video game, complete with traps, night-vision and chest-high walls. Lunatics with gimmicks like subterranean flamethrowing ATVS and mini-guns mounted in the backs of their big rigs act as sporadic boss fights. It’s one level after another of inventive violence, fused with the distinct possibility that anyone they meet – no matter how benevolent they seem – has the legal authority to solve even the tiniest problems with deadly force. In short: it’s pretty cool.
Like the original, The Purge: Anarchy has no pretense towards subtlety. It’s a brutish action film with political overtones that are repeatedly screamed in case someone in the audience is too stupid to get it. Slovenly misogynists scream about their rights while waving guns in the air. The rich (and therefore evil) reduce The Purge to a low-rent Running Man game show. Michael K. Williams (RoboCop) shows up as a revolutionary leader who plans to turn The Purge against the One-Percenters with less-than-eloquent speeches that eventually devolve into angrily barking the f-word. There is no subtext. There is only bright red text.
But the fundamentals of The Purge: Anarchy are simpy too broad to take it seriously. Only Grillo emerges as the film’s sole voice of rationality, using the annual holiday to justify a perfectly understandable (if not necessarily heroic) act of vengeance but ultimately torn between his compulsion to do the right thing and his temptation to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. As with the first film – which really wasn’t bad, just a little problematic – the sequel boils down to the question of whether having an excuse to behave violently is the same as being entitled to do so.
It’s self-righteous cinematic cynicism: congratulating itself for recognizing all the fundamental evils of the world by reducing them to unmistakable comic book allegories, only finding hope within the handful of characters who of recognize the fundamental flaws that the storytellers make thuddingly obvious to the audience. And yet you are still encouraged to enjoy The Purge: Anarchy for as exploitative entertainment. Perhaps the real question is whether having an excuse to feel smug about society’s problems is the same as having actually being constructive about it.
Whatever. It’s still pretty cool.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
