The Purge: Anarchy
James DeMonaco, 2014,
I couldn’t find any indication that Jello Biafra was offered a cameo in The Purge: Anarchy, which seems like an injustice given that it’s essentially a film adaptation of Dead Kennedys’ “Kill the Poor,” albeit an adaptation whose 104-minute runtime is markedly less incisive than what the DK song manages to say in a mere 180 seconds.
Still, Anarchy is an unqualified improvement over the first Purge film, whose one-note home-invasion plot Anarchy upgrades to a multifaceted exploration of how the titular carnage unfolds across various social strata. A very watchable Frank Grillo, in hyper-competent super-soldier mode, leads an ensemble of defenseless unfortunates trying to find sanctuary during the nationwide killing spree. If it all feels like a focus-grouped version of The Warriors, Michael K. Williams fills the role of that film’s Cyrus, replacing the effortlessly cool revolutionary speeches with a level of oratory you might expect from a WWE promo.
Anarchy’s well-worn class warfare tropes are too safe a bet to make it all that interesting, but I appreciate that it never stops moving. It’s got me (probably naively) dreading the remainder of the series a little less.
