Review of The Purge: Anarchy (2014) by Gareth J — 04 Jul 2015

When The Purge: Anarchy was released last year, the critics said that it improved on the original movie in almost every way. I'm inclined to agree.

Essentially, the film feels a lot like Battle Royal meets The Punisher as leading man (and resident badass) Frank Grillo leads a group of five embattled innocents through a nocturnal urban sprawl teeming with the sort of crazed, masked savages you'd rather expect to find in extreme video games like Manhunt.

Drawing on pretty much every well known survivalist Horror/Thriller from 28 Days Later to The Most Dangerous Game, director James DeMonaco uses his Michael Bay produced financial backing to full effect. Whole swathes of genuine Cityscape are twisted and corrupted into a nightmarish concrete labyrinth where even the most mundane metropolitan fixture is imbued with paranoia and menace.

The largely unknown cast all fair very well with the material too. Each of the five survivors feels like a real person - though Grillo does run the risk of straying into Rambo territory a little too often for my taste - and the sudden ruthless brutality of how many of the more likable supporting characters are ousted from the narrative easily rivals anything from The Walking Dead.

Where the film falls short is the logistics of it. Ultimately, The Purge: Anarchy relies too heavily on the core premise of it's predecessor and offers no real insight into the villains beyond the obvious political subtext of how the rich delight in creating human suffering for personal entertainment. In spite of a very pleasant Easter Egg (harking back to the first Purge), the ending feels empty and fails to address many of these points to a satisfactory level. The juxtaposition of Macro politics and personal stories may work for films like Contagion but feels clumsy in this context. Hopefully the 3rd Purge movie will address the unanswered questions to a higher degree.

In summary, better than the original due to it's higher budget though it's direction becomes a bit lost in the end.