Review: The Purge - Anarchy

Last year's The Purge is probably the one film in recent memory that requires a remake. Its sequel Anarchy makes up for a lot of the first's problems to make a decent dose of urban violence.

The film follows a man out to partake in the sixth annual Purge in an American city. His reasons are not explained, but he is armed like a small army and has a modified car to survive the violent streets. But not long after the Purge begins he finds himself defending four innocents trapped and being hunted down...

The problem with the first Purge was its lack of enthusiasm for its creative and original premise. We have a scenario for any crime to be legalized for twelve hours once a year, and yet all it did was give us the sort of murderous home invasion film we always get.
Anarchy does slightly better. We see a much broader view of what the Purge does to regular people as our characters move through a major city. The idea that the Purge is an outlet for personal rage and frustration depicted with bloody carnage and wanton violence.

It even extends the premise into something of a class war, giving the film series much needed teeth to elevate itself above the hordes of generic slasher movies. Is the Purge just to relieve tension in American citizens and provide safety and security for 354 days of the year as advertised, or is it something more insidious? The rich can defend themselves, but what about the poor?
The idea gets great foundations to begin with; two of our characters are part of a struggling family and feel sympathy towards a rebel cell fighting against the government that founded the Purge. The characters here are much, much stronger than in the previous film (not that this is a difficult task...)

The film does take the concept in some very eerie directions towards its conclusion, there is even a couple of great grey areas around the human capacity for violence, which is exactly the sort of head-turning controversy that this film series needs (and can easily provide!) to get noticed. It also has a lot less of the cliches that plagued the first film, our lead protagonist's motivations are kept so secretive that we still have something to look forward to besides the film's more traditional narrative trappings.

But while Anarchy plays the premise far better (practically erasing the first film from memory, yay!) it still seems as though writer/director James DeMonaco doesn't want to go into the intellectual side of his creation... Sure, Anarchy has a lot of weight when you read between the lines (dare I even say it has some real promise at times!) but it is too easy to see it as just another slasher movie.
Again, we don't see anything other than murder. Just, plain old murder. Sure there are different means this time, but the ends are always murder. While if this sort of scenario came to be, yes, murder would be the main threat and cities would become a chaos of marauding thugs and trained killers, but there must be a more insidious and personal side to crime at work that we aren't seeing in these movies. The Purge could still be a deeper, more character driven study into psychopathy and the depravity of the human animal... but DeMonaco is clearly going for the more marketable approach: blind violence.

It obliterates its predecessor. If you are concerned this is more of the same, don't be as Anarchy delivers a better dive into its rich premise and potential themes. But it isn't the edgy masterpiece it could easily be, and does seem to preach the idea that all Americans seem to think about when given the freedom from law is nothing but murder.

Review: The Purge

What with The Purge: Anarchy coming out this week, I decided I best catch up with last year's film that I failed to catch in cinemas. I had been told already that it was a bad movie, but sadly it didn't fail to live up to its reputation.

The Purge is set in near-future America where for one night in the year, all crime is legal. The film follows Ethan Hawke, a wealthy husband and father of two who designs home security against The Purge, but when his son rescues a homeless man and takes him into their home, a band of purgers arrive demanding their prey back otherwise they will kill everyone in the house to find him...

It has been said many times, but The Purge has a great premise, with near endless possibilities, and is not entirely dismissible as a real concept: society is seen to benefit from it as individuals can vent their most terrible anger and frustrations for just one night, rendering every other day of the year peaceful. What would you do during such an event, where you could do anything that is normally prohibited?
But unfortunately... the film takes this inspired, original premise and takes it down to its most base implementation: James, our protagonist, must defend his home from a horde of murderers. Yawn!

As a result the film is terribly uninteresting and very cliche. I find that horror films, or slasher films in this case, rely upon their setup, and you can tell a lot about them from the first fifteen minutes. The Purge needed to show more of its premise and its effect on the country as a whole before reducing it down to the narrow setting of one house; this feels like a sequel to a better movie. With such a premise, well developed characters can swing wildly out of balance; we could see seemingly normal everyday people commit crimes no one would expect of them. This film should be a fantastic delve into complex and/or deplorable acts humans are capable of!
 
But what little character building we get in the first few minutes is so transparently deliberate that there are zero surprises for the rest of the film; you know how it is going to play out, even down to its final dying minutes. 
It isn't laughably bad (although of course there are moments of character stupidity) but it is so mercilessly bland and colourless to behold that it is instantly forgettable. A lot of the film is shot in their house after the power has been cut, so we see a lot of stumbling about in pitch dark corridors, coupled with some of the lamest jump scares I've seen in recent memory (and I tend to fall for them, even the predictable ones, but some of these didn't even make me blink.)

Which is all very sad, because the premise is extremely interesting... but I cannot say that this film is worth watching for the premise alone since it so badly misses the opportunity. 

I somehow doubt this year's Anarchy will require watching The Purge in advance... So really there isn't much here to be interested in.