James DeMonaco’s The
Purge made a crazy amount of money at the box office; $60 million in the US
alone. Set in a near future America, for one night a year all crime is legal.
Those with a grudge, respectable citizens literally purging themselves of their
pent-up rage, and the psychos who just do it for fun – there are no emergency services,
nobody to stop them. Americans justify the annual Purge because, for the other
three-hundred-and-sixty-four days, crime is non-existent and the US economy is
booming. The problem is what happens if you find yourself caught up in the mayhem?
I expected the original film to be both a smart look at
society, how it hangs together by a thread, America’s obsession with gun crime
and home security, as well as being a fast-paced, tense, stupidly scary film
that gave your nerves a thorough workout. While The Purge was an impressively made thriller with some original
scares and a number of didn’t-see-that-coming plot twists, it didn’t take
advantage of its incredibly nasty and clever premise. It’s a well above average
home invasion thriller, nowhere near as frightening as David Moreau and Xavier
Palud’s Them (if you’re a fan of
horror and you’ve never seen Them,
you need to give it a watch; the final ten minutes are dizzying, disturbing
stuff!) and not quite up there with recent American horror classics such as The Last Exorcism or The Conjuring.
Instead
of focusing on one family and one location, DeMonaco’s sequel, The Purge: Anarchy is set across a whole
city: A nameless man (Frank Grillo) has decided to Purge for reasons unknown;
mother and daughter Eva (Carmen Ejogo) and Cali (Zoë Soul) are kidnapped by what
appears to be an organised hit squad; while Shane (Zack Gilford) and Liz (Kiele
Sanchez) are stranded whilst the Purge is going on around them.
Anarchy is unusual for a
sequel in that it’s a different genre from the original. The Purge was a horror film, no questions there; Ethan Hawke
wanders round his pitch black house, waiting for the next masked intruder to
leap out at him. The sequel is a Grindhouse-style action thriller. While there
are a couple of jolts that you don’t expect, the suspense this time round comes
from wondering who’s going to be shot, stabbed, set alight, or blown up.
Swapping from a small family to a group of survivors
mostly works here. Grillo is a murderer with a conscience. He will calmly snap
a man’s neck or shoot them, then follows this by checking that everyone in his
group are okay. We know nothing about Grillo except he’s good with a gun and hand-to-hand
combat (Bryan Mills’ younger brother – he even has Neeson’s jacket!), snarling
at anyone who asks about his past. Frustratingly, the last ten minutes of the
film, where we find out why Grillo is purging, feels rushed, it’s all wrapped
up too quickly. There’s a smart twist, but instead of hinting at Grillo’s
backstory throughout Anarchy’s running
time, it’s as if DeMonaco realised, when writing the script, that he had loose
ends to tie up and does all of this in the last few minutes. Ejogo and Soul
refuse to believe that violence solves anything, never getting their hands
dirty; all they want to do is survive and keep hold of their humanity. Gilford
and Sanchez are given the least interesting roles here as a couple who find
themselves out on the streets while everyone is killing each other. You get the
sense that Gilford and Sanchez’s roles were written just so they could stumble
into trouble and need rescuing. While none of the characters onscreen are all
that complex or conflicting, at least they’re not the usual stereotypes you
expect to see; DeMonaco tries to give us something different.
Anarchy
feels
a lot smarter than the original, spending more time putting its premise under
the microscope. The chief argument here is that a night where murder is legal is
simply the government’s way to keep the poor under control; the Powers That Be
see poverty stricken America as money down the drain instead of people with
families who are forced to put up with their situation. Only the rich make it
through the Purge; they have the money to defend themselves.
Just like The Purge,
Anarchy isn’t all that subtle when it
comes to its satire, but it has plenty of ideas you don’t normally see in a violent
splatter film: party political broadcasts casually mentioning anarchy and
murder; wealthy families paying ridiculous sums of money to a person’s family, so
they can do what they want with them (John Beasley surrounded by a suited and
booted family, all holding machetes, the room covered in plastic sheeting –
made all the more horrific because DeMonaco cuts away from what happens next).
The
Purge: Anarchy does what all sequels should do; it’s more
ambitious, it tries to do more. The latest in what is certain to be a
long-lasting franchise has plenty of well judged, wasn’t-expecting-that, action
set pieces, but it’s nowhere near as smart as it thinks it is, thanks to the
ideas this time round being ham-fistedly thrown at the screen. Anarchy
is one of those rare sequels that’s worthy of your time and thrilling to watch;
just not as successful as 28 Weeks Later
or Rec. 2, which both ripped up the
rules set out by the original films and veered off in the other direction.
3 out of 5
Matt
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