The Purge: Anarchy

Author's Note: Well...this is it. This is officially the end of my review list. No, I'm not done. This blog will continue. However, I will be scaling down to Fridays only, with Wednesday Review as horror movies come out. It's a bittersweet moment, knowing that I've worked so hard for so long to complete this. I hope you all enjoy this, my 153^rd regular review.

The Purge was a firecracker aimed at American's political Right. The Purge:Anarchy is a grenade. It's one of the most drastic perspective shifts in the history of Cinema. We're no longer seeing the Purge through the eyes of a rich, white family whose lives are in danger purely through their own bad luck. Instead, we see the people who fear for their lives every year.

There are five characters in three converging storylines. The most prominent characters are Eva and Cali Sanchez (Carmen Ejogo and Zoė Soul), a mother and daughter who are nearly raped by their apartment's maintenance man moments after the Purge commences, only for him to be killed by armored members of a Government Death Squad sent out to subsidize the killing.

Shortly before commencement they found a note revealing that Eva's father (John Beasley) sold himself to a wealthy family to be killed. This is a moment that somehow manages to be both touching and a punch to the gut, which shows us how truly sick the people of this society are, but the matter doesn't really come up again. I actually consider this something of a bold move on the part of the filmmakers, on a night as horrible as the Purge bad things happen and we have to move on.

Meanwhile, husband and wife Shane and Liz (Zach Gilford and Kiele Sanchez), are stuck in the midst of the Purge when a group of masked bikers cut their fuel line before commencement. All four characters are rescued by a mysterious man (Frank Grillo), who has come out to willingly participate in the Purge in search of one target. I use the term “rescued” loosely, here. While the man does save Eva and Cali, Shane and Liz sneak into his car, and he initially wants to cut all four of them loose afterward. However, over the course of the night they find means of staying near him, and it becomes clear that he isn't going to let an innocent person die while standing in front of him.

I'm not sure if the stranger's name is officially Leo Barnes, or if that's fan-given. If it was given in the movie I missed it, but IMDB credits the character as simply “Sergeant” for both Anarchy and the (as of this writing) upcoming Election Year. That said, most news sources seem to have no problem calling him Leo Barnes, so for the sake of simplicity I'll call him that for the rest of the review.

Of these three stories, I'd say Shane and Liz are easily the least developed. Basically, they're in the film because they were dumb enough to be out shortly before the Purge began. The only real development we get from them is Shane's death, leading to Liz's decision to Purge herself by fighting the people who killed him.

The story actually gets amazingly complex given the premise, with our heroes caught in the crossfire between at least three factions who are at varying degrees of war with each other on Purge night. We find out that the bikers are not themselves Purgers, but work for wealthy Purgers by kidnapping people off the streets and bringing them to be auctioned off for a Most Dangerous Game-style hunt. The government Hit Squad is led by a man named Big Daddy (Jack Conley), who not only sees The Purge as patriotic, but sees any attempt to save lives on Purge Night as morally wrong, and thus becomes determined to kill Barnes.

The final faction, however, is an anti-Purge Resistance Movement, led by a man named Carmelo Johns (Michael K. Williams), a character who's half-street preacher, half-Black Panther. Johns is established early in the film when Cali watches his videos online, but most of the population appears to believe he's simply an ideologue standing on a soap box, and are shocked when he and his followers actually succeed in taking out one of the Death Squads, and break into the auction house just in time to save four of our five heroes (the aforementioned loss of Shane), and recruiting Liz to their cause.

We eventually find out that Barnes is headed for the home of a drunk driver who killed his son. The ending is predictable: he threatens the man, the camera cuts away, and Barnes walks out of the house. He's shot and wounded by Big Daddy, who monologues about the importance of killing during the Purge rather than finishing him off. Big Daddy is then shot down by the driver, who Barnes had spared. The Purge ends, the Death Squad backs off, and Eva and Cali rush Barnes to a now-open hospital.

The first thing I should note is that the decision to carry Barnes over to the next film is easy to understand. He's badass, while still managing to be sympathetic. He's clearly someone who could easily make it among the upper echelons of Purgers if he participated without discretion, but instead he remains on a moral razor-edge. The decision of such a powerful individual to reject violence is a resounding statement within this universe. Honestly, forget Crossbones, this is the role Grillo was born to play.

I don't make a secret of the fact that I'm a Liberal (or Progressive or whatever else you want to call it), so it's obvious this series would appeal to me. Where the first movie seemed mildly insightful, this movie at times approached brilliance with it's social satire. The first film gave us the perspective of the 1%, and showed us how it could all come crashing down. This movie, however, shows us the real dark side, revealing how people of lower means can come to support policies against their own interests if they believe that they can find a way to rise above the masses.

The bikers, for instance, are prepared to see their neighborhoods turned into war zones, and have their own lives put in extreme danger, for a wad of bills likely worth no more than a few hundred dollars. The people they capture are then resold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. I don't think Bernie Sanders himself could have written a more clever send-up of Corporate greed.

Many of the characters who take part seem to represent a fairly uneducated version of Conservatives. I was fascinated to realize that in the first film there is never any reference to the “Right” to Purge being “given.” I imagine that in this world there's some justification for Purging being a “Natural Right” among educated Conservatives. In this film, however, at least two Purgers reference the Government “giving” them the Right. Notably, the maintenance man even gets the name of his own political party wrong, calling them the “New Found Fathers.”

I personally took the Death Squads as a parody of hypocritical corporate subsidies supported by “Free Market” advocates. The government allowed the Purge because it was “natural,” but then sends out killers when it turns out people aren't as naturally violent as they had hoped. Maybe I'm reading in too deeply, but I think the critique is there.

There are elements in this film that are underused. Carmelo Johns is little more than a cameo, clearly setting up for future films. Edwin Hodge returns as the homeless man from the first film, now one of Johns followers. Both Hodge and Williams give great performances, and I'm hoping Election Year features them fighting alongside Barnes much more extensively.

The bottom line is, if you're a liberal you'll like this movie. If you're a Libertarian or something similar, you'll probably also find some things to like. If you like the current Government Establishment...well, hello Senator McConnell, happy to have you reading my post! Unfortunately, you probably won't like this movie.

Wednesday Review: The Purge: Election Year

I would pay a lot to see the look on Miley Cyrus’ face when she was told that the makers of The Purge: Election Year wanted to license Party in the U.S.A.  I nearly died laughing from the song’s use in this film.  It was the single most ridiculous scene in this series to date, and that’s really saying something.

I love this series.  I think director James DeMonaco has captured the zeitgeist of the 2010s better than any other single filmmaker.  We’re living in an age when we’re angry.  What we’re angry at is incidental.  We don’t trust our leaders, and the idea that they would actually legalize crime for 12 hours every year somehow doesn’t sound that farfetched.

My reviews of the first two films will post around the end of the year, but suffice it to say: I liked the original, but I recognize that Anarchy was a massive improvement, moving away from a Home Invasion thriller to a street-level view of the chaos.  Now, for our third installment, we get a Political Thriller.

While I may reevaluate this later, I currently consider Election Year to be the best film of the series to date.  The return of Frank Grillo as Leo Barnes lets us keep the heart of Anarchy, while also giving us a much stronger narrative.  Anarchy was, for the most part, a series of events that happened on Purge Night.  Election Year, on the other hand, has a real central conflict.

An Independent female Senator is running for President on a platform of ending the Purge through Executive Action (it shouldn’t bug me that a President can’t completely overrule a Constitutional Amendment in a movie already this silly, but it kind of does).  Rather than a traditional assassination, the New Founding Fathers decide to rewrite the rules of the Purge to remove the usual exemption for high-ranking government officials, making the Senator a target for Purge supporters.

On Purge night the Senator finds herself on the run, under the protection of Leo as her head of security, and various other supporters.  The stakes are clear, the story is exciting, and the world continues to be more and more fleshed out as we really see what the nation has come to.  I’d also say this film manages to avoid having any characters that feel redundant or unlikeable, giving it one-up on Anarchy.

While I don’t want to spoil too much (and don’t want to walk into overly awkward territory), I did notice that this film made the racial aspects of the Purge more overt.  The theme of racial tension was there in the first two films, which did show the largest number of Purge victims as minorities.  Election Year, however, actually showed White Supremacists as agents of the NFFA, and had one character make racial jokes that were probably intended to make the audience squirm a bit.  I was also surprised that the film opted to feature the Crips in one scene, rather than a fictional gang.

It’s starting to come out in the news now that this may be the final Purge film, and the ending was clearly written to make the movie a suitable finale, while leaving the possibility of more sequels up in the air.  I have a lot of respect for the fact that the studio let this take us off guard, rather than practically writing “finale” across the moon the way the Saw series did.  It was legitimately surprising when plot threads that have run through the series began to resolve themselves, and the status quo was blow to ashes, primarily because I didn’t expect anything to be resolved.

That said, I do hope there are more Purge movies.  This is a concept that has held up far better film-to-film than many other series that lasted much longer (*cough*Paranormal Activity*cough*).  It’s an idea so much fun that it’s difficult not to make a good movie from it.  It would be a real shame if we only got to enjoy it three times.