The Purge: Anarchy
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.
Five posts in this series
The Purge
In keeping with this year’s ad hoc and mostly lowbrow Robtober, and since most of the Purge movies are available on streaming services I currently have access to, I’m reluctantly giving them a go. I didn’t hate this one any less than the first time I saw it; it’s perhaps the low-water mark of boneheaded Blumhouse mediocrity, with a kindergarten-level attempt at social commentary, cut-rate cinematography, and the most irritating villain this side of Martin… See more →
The Purge: Anarchy
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… See more →
The Purge: Election Year
I’m not having a good month, and these Purge movies are not helping. But will I stop watching them? Apparently I will not.
There’s a MacGuffin this time, an anti-Purge senator (Elizabeth Mitchell) whose presidential bid aims to upend the barbaric status quo, which of course makes her a target. After narrowly escaping an assassination attempt, she flees her home, and it just so happens the head of her security detail is Leo Barnes (Frank… See more →
The First Purge
Like the other films in the franchise, The First Purge’s clear polemical ambitions are paved over by commercial ones. But this one’s blaxploitation revival is a bigger missed opportunity, because it might have really had something to say.
At the top, a montage of TV news talking heads gives us a cursory history of the rise of the New Founding Fathers of America, an autocratic political party whose introduction of the Purge, an annual… See more →
The Forever Purge
Maybe the best thing you can say for The Forever Purge, which was originally slated for release in July of 2020, is that it cleverly predicts January 6th, at least until you remember that the loudest man on the planet had a global captive audience that year, not limited to his devoted cult of wackos, and anyone with half a brain cell could read the tea leaves.
In perhaps the series’s most ham-fisted attempt at… See more →