The Purge: Anarchy
Rating: 3.5/5
By: Nathaniel Simpson
If you read my review for the first entry in the Purge franchise, you might have agreed with me that the concept for this story is really interesting, but it wasn't fully realized throughout the film. While we are stuck with the Sandin family and their struggle to survive, there was a full crime-fest going on in the streets that we unfortunately didn't see. With the second film in the franchise, The Purge: Anarchy, writer and director James DeMonaco decides to let the audience see this world that he has conjured up, allowing us to have a front-row seat to the carnage and mayhem that our characters have to go through to make it to safety. However, unfortunately, while I wanted something like this for the first movie, this one just didn't seem to resonate or stand-out to me, making me wish we were back with the Sandins in the house from the first film.
The film follows a group of diverse people who are forced to band together in Los Angeles to survive through the Purge night. There's waitress Eva (Carmen Ejogo) and her daughter Cali (Zoë Soul), there's LAPD Sergeant Leo (Frank Grillo) who has a personal vendetta he wants to act out on this night. And finally we have Shane (Zach Gilford) and Liz (Kiele Sanchez), an estranged couple who are going through a divorce and can't stand to be with one another. When circumstances find all of them in the streets of L.A. with nowhere to go when the annual Purge commences, they must put their differences aside and trust one another to make it out of the night alive, which proves especially difficult when mob boss Big Daddy (Jack Conley) is constantly on their heels.
While the first film seemed a little more intimate in the regard of it focusing on one family and this small set of characters, DeMonaco sort of busted the second film wide open and wanted to tell a much more broad and bold film. While I wanted it to be more of an open-world sort of film to fully realize the potential this idea has, and I appreciate that is what he wanted to give us, it feels like he may have bit off more than he can chew here. There is so much going on that, at times, it is hard to fully keep track of our characters and to build this meaningful relationship with them.
It was easy to do so with this film's predecessor due to it being such a small cast of characters, but with this one, we have to find a reason to care about the characters here, and some are introduced for such brief periods of time. Consider when the group reach Tanya's house, where her family is. There is so much that occurs with new characters that it is truly difficult to distinguish how we feel about what happens to some of the characters affected here. For me, personally, I liked the more intimate character relationships, and it makes me wonder how great the first film would be if DeMonaco was able to craft a blend of these two films together. If the Sandins went out into the world and saw everything that was going on and had to try to survive, I think that would've worked a lot better than what we have here.
While I do have trouble with the story and what DeMonaco was trying to set up here, there is no doubt that I enjoyed this world he crafted, as a whole. It is as deliciously wicked and dark as I was expecting, and he definitely delivered with this sort of setting and idea. At the same time, I do think the actors work well with what they are given here, and they try their hardest to tap into these characters and how their backstories affect their stories going forward. I feel like this movie has the ingredients for success, but it simply doesn't work in my book unfortunately.
I think this is one of those films where the parts are better than the whole. DeMonaco delivers on what I wanted from the first film, but there are aspects that he crafted the first time around that are simply better than this movie by a long shot. He traded some of the best aspects to give the viewer what they wanted from this idea in the first movie, and I wish he was able to find a balance between the two. While I appreciate the fact he really went for it with Anarchy, it just simply doesn't do its job to its fullest potential here.
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