“The Purge” was a standard Hollywood thriller with a stellar premise. A good ten years into the future, unemployment is way down and violent crime is practically non-existent thanks to a yearly event called The Purge. For twelve hours every year (7PM-7AM, sometime in March), all crime including murder is legal. Emergency services are turned off. This tends to weed out the poor, the homeless, or “non-contributing members of society.”
The first film focused on an affluent family whose home was broken into by others jealous of their wealth. It made for a serviceable home invasion thriller, but was truly a missed opportunity given the rich concept. “The Purge: Anarchy” feels like what the first film should have been. It’s not much different than “Crash,” where unrelated characters and stories come together and create a common bond among vastly different people.
An unnamed hero (Frank Grillo) saves two sets of people, a working class mother and daughter, and a couple on the verge of separation, both of whom were unluckily thrown out on the streets in the midst of the annual purge. The unlikely gang has to work together to save each other from certain death.
The concept is so interesting because of its plausibility. America is a country obsessed with violence, and everyone in this getting more and more angry with society. We blindly follow rules and regulations that the government swears are in our own best interest. “Anarchy” features a radical group of Youtube-bloggers whose mission is to expose the world to the truth that it is apparently too lazy to see.
In this world, the very rich (the 1%, if you will) hold ‘auctions’ on purge night, where people bid on strangers on a stage, the highest bidder getting to kill whoever they bid on. How reprehensible is that? The scariest thing is that, if something like the purge ever came into reality, this is exactly how things would go. But I think, as American citizens, we’re really far away from anything like that being a reality. Right?
The film is suspenseful and fast enough to forgive its stock characters and mid-grade dialogue. Details of the plot are paid heavier attention than dialogue, which I can live with. This one kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time. While the home-invasion version of this story was fine, this is the story that should have been told the first go around. There’s civil unrest and abhorrent violence at every turn, but there’s also justice for the bad guys, and mercy for those who don’t deserve to die that way. If you haven’t seen the first “Purge”, you can still see this one without missing anything. In fact, if you haven’t seen the first film, I would recommend watching this one first. It’s much better and far more satisfying.
