K-SCORE: 23
Writer / Director: James DeMonaco
Starring: Frank Grillo, Carmen Ejogo, Zach Gilford, Kiele Sanchez, Michael K. Williams
Spoiler Level: Moderate, (though can you really spoil something this dumb?)
Remember in the 90’s when people used to talk about how sad they were that sequels were always way worse than originals. Those were the days. Now filmmakers are churning out new entries into franchises that were horrible right at the start. I call it the Fast Phenomenon because there’s no better example of this than the truly mystifying success of The Fast and the Furious and it’s siblings. So tonight I had the pleasure of watching The Purge: Anarchy even though I thought the first purgation film was dogshit and it was used as a rallying call for rioting Baltimorons.
“If you rape a woman on Purge Night, they get pregnant as a result, do you have to pay child support?”
The Purge: Anarchy is better than The Purge only because it gets the characters out of the houses and onto the street where the psychopaths roam. It still has one of the dumbest, least plausible, least workable premises I’ve ever come across in a story. Who Framed Roger Rabbit is more likely to come to fruition than this world. The idea that “all crime is legal for twelve hours” is still way more fun to mock in real life than it is to watch on the big screen. The writers just don’t have answers to the essential questions nor do they have the imagination to do anything substantial with this inconceivable idea.
I avoid interacting with others on non-purge nights...
So crime is legal for a night. Yet again I find myself thinking about a lot of legal and societal questions. If you shoot someone on Purge Night and they die the morning after, are you guilty of murder? If you rape a woman on Purge Night, they get pregnant as a result, do you have to pay child support? How do you pinpoint a crime to a specific moment in time? What’s to stop one of these serial killers from saying, “I know! I’ll do my killing year round and then on Purge Night I’ll just come dump the bodies on the street and say, ‘Hey, I really hit the jackpot this year!’”
Scott especially can’t suspend his disbelief that this many people would want to commit murder, and that the only thing stopping them is laws. This flawed ideology is actually one I see everywhere. The reality is that laws and consequences from governmental power are not the only things stopping people from committing heinous acts. Yet in the film, we’re sometimes literally tripping over would-be murderers who I guess lead normal lives 364.5 days a year.
And again the characters in the film do a horrible job at staying safe. Don’t cluster in groups of other people with guns. Throughout the movie people who are trying to purge often make one weak attempt at it and get shot in the face. All year to plan and you ended up being machine gun fodder. I hope you enjoyed your annual purge!
Even accepting the beyond-stupid premise, the film fails because of flat characters, passing around weak or obvious sentiments as they run through the streets trying not to get murdered. There is a black family whose father / grandfather sells his life to a rich white family for a hundred thousand dollars, presumably to help out his daughter and granddaughter. Well, he could have stayed home and helped with the barricades because they were pathetic as multiple groups of purgers come right into their apartment immediately. How’d they survive the other years? They keep getting saved by the next person that wants their kills to his (usually not her) purge night total. It’s all about that K/D ratio.
There is also a white couple offering nothing to the other plots. Their car is sabotaged during the day making me wonder if the people that did that are guilty of just destruction of property or destruction of property and attempted murder. Don’t know. They join the black mother/daughter team running around like kids in a playground nervous they’re going to get tagged. It looks for a minute like they’ll separate, you know, since there’s no reason for them to be hanging out together at all and doing so clearly endangers all of their lives, but then they decide to follow their emotional impulses and stay in a tight pack. It just goes to teach you that a good purging can really bring people together, teach us who we really love and what really matters. Well… until half of everyone is riddled with bullets from a truck-mounted railgun.
The last character followed in The Purge: Anarchy is some ex-military professional killer who lost his son to a… DUI accident and decides to do some rescuing while mid avenging wrath rampage. He is well-trained, well-armed, and clearly extremely pissed off throughout, so naturally the other characters yell at him, lie to him, steal his stuff, ruin his car, and tell him what’s his “responsibility.” Purge or no Purge, even I would have kneecapped one or two of them after a couple hours of that crap.
Ah, I suppose it’s entertaining enough though, watching mindless, dimly lit rioting taking place on the same alleyway set shot and reshot from every conceivable angle to try to create the illusion that characters are moving. Way to go Purge franchise. Cheap production quality, no star actors, selling a dumb premise and profiting off it’s name recognition because adolescents were attracted to its anarchistic violence at a convenient political point in time.