Just Another Night to Remember

I feel sooo relaxed now that I’ve seen the sequel The Purge: Anarchy.

Seriously. There’s som’in’ soothing about watching folks with carte blanche to commit like, just about any known crime (including murder), take advantage of their right to exercise this release for one night only, in order to ensure that the renewed peace (and lower unemployment and crime rates) achieved in the near future by the totalitarian New Founding Fathers of America is preserved the rest of the year.

Right....


Whereas last year’s sleeper – a micro-budgeted hit from the man who knows all about that kind o’ filmmaking, producer Jason Blum, that starred Ethan Hawke as the determined pater familias of a bunch being terrorized at home in the ’burbs – this follow-up is led by Frank Grillo (Captain America: The Winter Soldier) and mostly set in the dangerous downtown streets of what looks a heckuva lot like L.A.

The year is 2023, and the purge, which is meant to serve as a soul cleansing, is now in its sixth year.

As you can imagine, it is bloody business, and not at all the kind s--- you wanna be caught in the middle of, unwitting participant-style. Unless you’re purging, which Grillo’s unnamed-throughout character is. That is, until he’s not.

He gets sidetracked going against his instinct and his need to get his Purge on when he decides to assist a mother-daughter duo (Carmen Ejogo and Zoë Soul) targeted by some heavily armed (government?) goons, as well as a not-so-happy young couple (Zach Gilford, from TV’s Friday Night Lights, and Kiele Sanchez, from TV’s Lost) that has come into some trouble of their own after a car break.

Twelve long and frightful hours later, once the night of the Purge is over and done with for another successful year, only some of ’em will have made it, the bleak universe of the franchise will have been expanded, and you, we, the audience, will, perhaps, wish for a little more.

A little more context to the ritual – which may be coming soon, as a third Purge movie is in the works (as a prequel to the first one) – and a little more subversiveness. See, the first Purge was so, well...fun because it was a perfectly timed wish fulfillment on this revenge on the 1 percent.

The Purge: Anarchy, with its subplot about a group of anti-Purger citizen resistance on the rise (the new tradition, everyone seems to agree, is designed to target the poor), ends up coming across as a Hunger Games sans political commentary...even though the political commentary is in the mix.

If the powers that be will insist on producing further installments of this new wave of torture porn, they need to remember to play with the politics of the the plot. Otherwise, they’ll just lazily asking us that we fork over our dough for a more mayhem-y, violent sort of big-screen Survivor.

And I won’t be up for that, Grillo (a character actor in a commanding turn) or no Grillo.

My Rating **1/2

Photo: Indiewire.com.