The Purge: Anarchy – Movie Review

The Purge: Anarchy – R
Release Date: Fri 18 Jul 2014

2013’s The Purge had an interesting premise behind a somewhat lackluster setting. In The Purge and its sequel, the government makes all crime including murder legal for 12 hours once per year. This wasn’t explored in much depth in the first film, with the plot centering around a single home invasion in the suburbs. Anarchy takes this premise to an urban setting and feels like a much wider scope and one where much more can happen.

To the movie’s credit, it touches upon many of the permutations of what such a policy would entail. There’s vigilantism, a violent counter-government anti-purge militia, families pushed to desperate extremes and, of course, people just out for some state-sanctioned mayhem.

For as dark a plot as the movie has, it’s not overly graphic with its violence and the body count remains very low compared to what I expected. The plot keeps you guessing, though it does have a fairly short attention span where the setting has to change every five to ten minutes. In this way it almost feels like a video game. The characters are great for the genre, with no outright stupid or annoying characters. If anything, the movie is a bit too serious as a few tensions breakers or dark comic moments would have helped make it more memorable.

It will be interesting to see if these characters return in another installment or if everything starts fresh for the third film. In other words, whether or not the cast itself is purged remains to be seen.

Matthew and I saw it in the theater had a discussion in the car: