The Purge: Anarchy, 2014.
Written and directed by James DeMonaco.
Starring Frank Grillo, Carmen Ejogo, Zach Gilford, Kiele Sanchez, Zoë Soul and Justina Machado.
SYNOPSIS:
The Purge: Anarchy follows an unlikely group of five citizens who, over the course of the night, find out just how far they will go to protect themselves and, ultimately, each other, as they fight to survive a night fraught with impossible decisions
Last year’s The Purge provided a great idea but a poor execution. It’s not that the movie was too insular as home-invasion flicks like You’re Next played really well, but it had poor characters, a lack of drive and too much contrivance to really be anything more other than “okay”. But, the idea of a world where crime is legal for 12-hours once a year was incredibly striking and it opened up the opportunity for bigger and better sequels. And bigger and better is what he have with The Purge: Anarchy.
The Purge: Anarchy moves the action to the streets as three separate groups are thrust together in a desperate quest for survival. There’s the couple whose car broke down, a mother and daughter who were targeted by a suspicious group and a mysterious man who seems hell-bent on completing a certain mission. They must work as a team in order to avoid gangs in masks, rich Purgers who pay for their kills and a convoy of machine gun wielding trucks that are seemingly watching their every move.
The movie takes the action and drama from The Purge and turns it up a few notches, but it’s never scary or tense. However, it is intense with several of the action sequences being frantic and out of control. It succeeds because the main characters are never in control or safe, which means you as an audience don’t feel in control or safe either. Director James DeMonaco handles the quieter scenes with style and grace while the scarier scenes are frenetic and nerve-racking. It never relies on jump scares to frighten its audience, but more horror would have been to the film’s benefit.
DeMonaco’s script has allowed to open out this world and The Purge: Anarchy explores some very interesting ideas. It looks into what drives certain people to purge and how the rich and wealthy get their kicks on this night of violence without putting themselves in danger and it’s in these moments that the movie really works. Its pretty basic Hunger Games-esque dichotomy of rich=evil and poor=bullied is a very childish and would have been better if DeMonaco had offered up a shade of grey in between the black and white. One of the brilliant parts of the first movie was the argument about all the good the annual purge does for the country and that is something that The Purge: Anarchy is missing.
By opening up the world of The Purge, we’re able to introduce new gangs and types of purgers. The masked and face-painted gang who have adorned the majority of the marketing campaigns are the lead antagonists and they feel very Troma-esque in their design and Warriors-like in their execution. With this movie clearly becoming a franchise, it would be nice to see DeMonaco look into these types of purgers more in future entries to ensure the series doesn’t get bogged down with “non-purgers trying to survive the night”.
The cast all do a solid job, but there are no stand out performances to take note of. Frank Grillo is awesome in his Punisher-style role, Zach Gilford (who featured in the God-awful Devil’s Due) is very good at bringing a few moments of fleeting levity but it’s really Zoë Soul who is the stand-out star. Her story with Grillo is incredibly hammy and contrived but it works well for her character and makes her very likeable – something that could not be said for any of the cast in the original movie.
A vast improvement over the movie that came before it, The Purge: Anarchy is everything you want to see from this franchise. It’s intense and fairly violent with some great action and a cast of characters you want to see survive. It could have done with being a bit less biased to its ideals and a few more scares, but overall The Purge: Anarchy is a brilliant thrill-ride. Along with Oculus, this will be on the best horror movies of the year.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of the Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.
Originally published July 18, 2014. Updated April 12, 2018.
