The Purge: Anarchy

Christopher Nolan is a filmmaker famous for incorporating the themes and ideas of his stories into his direction.  In Memento, the audience experiences the same journey of recreating memory as the protagonist.  The Prestige is structurally a trick as magical as the ones perfected by its rival magicians.

Writer/Director James DeMonaco is no different.  Once every year, audiences are forced to suffer the same crap for what seems like twelve hours.

The Purge:  Anarchy follows the exact premise as its 2013 predecessor where in a dystopia run by a mysterious Tea Party-esque government called The Founding Fathers of America, once every year for 12 hours all crime is declared legal.  This annual Purging (if you will) is a government-sanctioned law enacted for controlling the population…and for rich white people to kill off middle and lower class all other people.  In Anarchy, we follow three groups of characters who ultimately intersect and band together to survive the night.  One of these characters has got, surprise surprise, back story and a mysterious agenda that no audience member who has seen more than one movie in their entire life could possibly care about.  (SPOILER:  His son was killed by a drunk driver who, wow, got off with a technicality and now he wants revenge in a plot which has literally never been done in a movie before).

Frank Grillo (Captain America:  The Winter Soldier) plays the pissed off ex-dad and basically The Punisher with his black armored car, black coat, and shitload of guns that also somehow make him the guy all of the other useless characters want to stick with in order to survive the 12 hours.  The other, I guess, protagonists include a single mother (Carmen Ejogo) who waitresses to take care of her daughter and elderly, dying father (which of course makes her oh so very sympathetic), and young couple (Kiele Sanchez from Lost and Zach Gilford from Friday Night Lights) who are in the middle of a marriage/relationship-ending separation (which of course makes them oh so very sympathetic).  At least Michael K. Williams (Boardwalk Empire) is around a bit as an anti-rich people revolutionary to make a few scenes at least somewhat not unbearable.  Thank goodness his character existed for the sole purpose of showing up at the last second to save the rag tag band of misfits who came together to find themselves and capture our hearts all within the same sequel.

Oh, and as for characters being saved at the last second…there’s a lot of that going around.  A lot of Bad Guys pointing guns at Good Guys, making speeches, then getting shot just before they can execute said Good Guys.  For a movie as politically-charged as DeMonaco thinks it is, there sure ain't a whole lotta original ideas being tossed around.  At least with the first The Purge, the concept was still fresh and we had Lena Headey (The Purge) and Ethan Hawke (The Purge) to care about, just because they were Lena Headey (Oh yeah, Game of Thrones) and Ethan Hawke (Explorers), and the simplicity of a story about a family just trying to survive the night while their home was besieged kept the furnaces fueled for at least the first hour.  But while DeMonaco thought of an interesting bare bones concept…he definitely neglected to think of much else.  For a futuristic dystopia, there sure ain’t a whole lot of world-building.  The annual Purge automatically transforms every human being on Earth into a sociopath who only drives around firing guns into the air and screaming.  If all crime is legal, shouldn’t more than just one crime be committed?  And DeMonaco’s politics aren’t thinly-veiled…they’re buck-ass streaking.  Every rich person is not only white, but also a machete-wielding Libertarian Frankensteined together from every The Most Dangerous Game rip-off in literature and cinema.  Ultimately, the style and feel of the movie is what kills it.  It’s not gritty enough like the John Carpenter action films of the 80s, nor tongue-in-cheek enough like Paul Verhoeven science fiction.  It’s Hollywood assembly-line product. 

I’ll give the film credit where credit’s due.  The last line before the credits is truly terrifying.

364 days until the next Purge…

Christ.

Rating: * out of ****

(in theaters July 18th, 2014)