I’ve read ingredients labels that were scarier than “The Purge: Anarchy,” a plodding horror flick that mistakenly thinks it has big ideas.
It’s 2023, when a ruling NRA-like political party has replaced the olive branch on the national seal with an assault rifle and established a single night when all crime is legal. (Wouldn’t people be looting jewelry stores instead of thrill-killing one another?)
Five random citizens find themselves exposed on the street, trying to keep alive during Purge night. One is a well-armed soldier (Frank Grillo); two are a whiny, boring couple (Zach Gilford, Kiele Sanchez); two others are equally bland mother-and-daughter lambs (Carmen Ejogo, Zoë Soul) who represent the suffering underclass.
They spend most of the movie creeping around the darkness exchanging gunfire with Purge-loving hooligans. The technical term for the cinematography is, I believe, “black sock placed over camera lens.” Each dull character is barely discernible in the murk.
The villains in this sequel — as they were in last year’s slightly more watchable original — are pearl-wearing dowagers and floppy-haired preppies, the Muffys and Bradleys from the Greenwich Polo Club. Not exactly scary, nor do they have much in common with the NRA unless the latter start hosting art-gallery openings and chardonnay tastings.
James DeMonaco, the deeply confused writer-director of both “Purge” movies, can’t decide whether Purging is a good thing — whether it would be exploited by the poor (yay!) or the rich (boo!).
Though DeMonaco announces the Purge as a way a conservative-nightmare society would cleanse itself of the underclass, this satiric trope is so beyond farfetched — the rich would just cower behind security gates — that he repeatedly finds himself slipping into examples of how the poor would use the Purge as a legalized uprising.
Early on, a Black Panther-like radical (Michael K. Williams) takes to the airwaves to protest Purge night, which he calls a means for redistributing income from the poor to the rich. Er, how does that work? “Stick ’em up! Hand over the 43 cents in your pocket!”
The revolutionistas show their contempt for the Purge by being even more violent on Purge night than the Ralph Lauren models that are supposedly the problem. And there’s a scene in which a stockbroker is shown strung up for raiding pensions. So isn’t the Purge the one night when the proletariat can achieve justice?
Never mind. The only plot connected to this movie that makes sense is the story of its making: It’s a means for redistributing income from poor ticket buyers to rich Hollywood types by selling the former the attractive lie that their problems are somehow the fault of the wealthy.