The year is 2023, crime is at an all time low thanks to The Purge, the one night a year where all crime is legal, including murder. Are you ready to once again let out the beast and purge yourself? The Purge: Anarchy is the sequel to 2013’s The Purge. Where the first movie centers on one family during the night of the Purge, Anarchy gives us a chance to see how the rest of the city deals with the unholy night that no one can escape, no matter how hard they try.
This time around, we follow three storylines that end up weaving together into one. We find Shane and Liz, a couple driving to Shane’s sister’s house in Los Angeles to wait out the Purge, when their car runs out of gas just as the Purge commences. Meanwhile, Leo Barnes goes out into the streets to get revenge on the man who killed his son, and a mother and daughter, Eva and Cali, run into the night after an unknown group of well-equipped assailants break into their home. The five people meet up as they attempt to survive the night.
The most interesting character in the movie is Frank Grillio’s Leo Barnes. He has a clear-cut mission, kill the man who killed his son. He sets off to do just that, but gets sidetracked when he decides to help Eva, Cali, Shane, and Liz. As he reluctantly keeps helping them, he gets himself further and further away from his main goal. He’ll stop at nothing to get back on his mission, but as he keeps going, you see a man who is put in an impossible situation and is struggling with himself to be a good man and not a bad one.
The Eva and Cali storyline is also interesting. They keep the thread of the first movie of the family just trying to stay safe. They represent the low-income families that can’t afford the high tech safety that others can. Where the rich can stay safe from to Purge on in the comfort of their own home, Cali and Eva feel the Purge is nothing more than the government’s way of population control. Their fears are soon realized as they begin to see the truth as they try to survive the night.
Least interesting plot is the characters’ of Liz and Shane. They are trying to get to safety as they get singled out by a group of mask-wearing thugs who follow them pretty much the whole flick. Shane and Liz represent the middle-class. They may not agree with the Purge itself, but they also don’t do anything against it either. Out of every other character, they just seem boring and clichéd. A little more time could have been spent on developing them more, or coming up with new characters all together.
They bring in a character named Carmelo, played Michael K. Williams, who is starting the revolution against The Purge, showing us that there is a resistance to the new government and the lower classes will not just lay down and take it, that they will fight the man to stay alive and that The Purge is wrong. But, his character is underused here. He feels more like a character they would use in the next flick, so he’s just an induction and a plot device.
The movie suffers from the same issues the first one did, in that the filmmakers set up this very interesting world and then end up having less than stellar stories to tell from it. At least Anarchy gets us out of a house and we get to learn more about the world, but it’s still not enough. They leave you with more questions that could be answered in later movies, if the series continues.
The movie keeps to the original as far as the blood and gore, which isn’t much for a movie that is categorized as “horror-thriller”. The gore is kept pretty tame, limiting it to bullet and stabbing wounds only. Most of the R rating is for bad language. The practical effects are good and the movie is shot nicely, but really, nothing in the movie could be thought out of as “outside of the box”.
It’s all very standard. From the plot, music, look, and the general filmmaking on a whole. It’s not a bad movie, but it’s far from being great. There is a great Purge movie some where out there, but the first two attempts feel more like small appetizers to a bigger picture that we may never see. The movie is fun, but forgettable the moment you walk out of the theater.