Film Review | The Purge: Anarchy

The plot is simple. For 12 hours straight, any American is given the right to thrive in crime without the legal repercussion. The result is a grand deathmatch, a purge by the state organised NFFS: The New Founding Fathers of America.

For the second instalment of yet another horror franchise, the same film makers who have capitalized on Friday the 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and any other genre ripe enough for summer, (Transformers 1, 2 etc), finally introduce us to what they expect to be an arthouse entry with a belief in Anarchy.

Diabolical, gross, and reminiscent of a classic B-movie, director James Demonaco attempts to sway his audience with the right kind of political zeitgeist; ‘If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution’. It’s catchy, attractive, and spliced with enough found footage that made his first instalment so highly desirable by the film buff and anyone else alike.

However, all that footage remained suspended, leaving The Purge to be one of the highest grossing movies of 2013 but with a shared feeling of disappointment to follow. Now, it finally delivers its audience to the promised land of the first instalment. Away from the suburban semi-detached house under home invasion along with Ethan Hawke, we are taken to watch the street in downtown L.A., for its rats, tire marks, and the entirety of one’s inner beast unleashed.

Anyone is allowed to freely participate in this wave of murders, crude mask-wearing hermaphrodites included, but its true monster is said to be the Wall Street 1%. Bidding on the weak, the poor, and any statistic that cannot afford to be part of a world where unemployment is at an all-time low, the wealthy buy, kill, and deal their own victims.

However, while this wave of a dance led by Demonaco adopts the Emma Goldman tactic of one-liners for the rise of anarchy in America, his storytelling leaves a lot to be desired. Each character remains somewhat flat, left to run or be killed for 12 hours that are downsized to a nice hundred-and-three minutes of on screen action.

With colourful photography by Jacques Jouffret’s cinematographic debut, the audience is kept alert but at the same time, it doesn’t quite match up to what I understand The Purge franchise to be really about. Simply put, B-movie plots work well with ‘bad’ cinematography - it lets me not take a person seriously and instead wait for him or her to be killed off with the next omen. However, when the cheap story is given a decent eye like Jouffret’s, shooting a close-up of an already dead and null character entrapped in a night of terror will always fall short.

The only sense of curiosity that is allowed for is the role-played by Frank Grillo. The actor is caricatured as a sergeant out on a mission, whose moral balance is tipped at the sight of a soft heart, the moment when he decides to save two girls from being kidnapped.

Not that you should expect anything else from Michael Bay’s repertoire. After all, this is the same production house that has run amuck with that special kind of VFX blockbuster. Like a bad video game with its readymade set of voiceovers at the click of a button, The Purge cannot save itself from what it is, and shouldn’t have too.

The only beguiling moment is when it actually tries to sound like a political gesture. The closest this film ever gets to the Occupy Wall Street issue is when it hints at the revolutionary follow up of the only character to return from the first episode, i.e Carmelo Johns’s call to action as a freedom fighter and head of the anti-NFFS. He does not conform to the ritual of ‘be safe’, the equivalent of ‘Merry (christmas)…’ this, that, or a ‘happy new year’ before bedtime, but rather, evokes a revolution for the third and hopefully final moment of the series.