Weekend at the Movies – The Purge – Anarchy

The Purge: Anarchy is set a handful of years in the future, when the “New Founding Fathers” have taken over America and instituted the titular purge: one night, every year, all laws, including murder, are suspended, along with any emergency, police, or medical services. The idea is that one night of purging will leave a person clean for the remainder of the year. For one man (Frank Grillo), the purge is also an opportunity to punish the man who killed his son. Unfortunately, his straight line to vengeance is bent when he stops to rescue a mother and her daughter from a group of shadowy government-type soldiers.

The Courteous Take

This is in no way the worst movie I’ve seen this year, but for my particular sensibilities, I think it might be the most offensive. The Purge: Anarchy is full of broad, sweeping, angry cynicism—directed at government, at the rich, at the idea of America itself—but none of it has any substance. There’s no philosophy behind this film’s philosophy, only anger for anger’s sake.

It sickens me to describe, but the only way the conceptual framework of this movie makes sense to me is if it were deliberately aimed at and designed to appeal to the kind of lower-middle-class audience who thinks that they’re poor because they can’t afford a bigger TV this year. Why else spend so much time demonizing the rich?

Early on in the movie, the father of one protagonist runs away in the night to martyr himself to a rich family in exchange for a big cash pay-off for his daughter and granddaughter. This is, we’re told, how the rich manage to purge without getting their hands dirty. Then, we are shown them, for a moment, gleefully brandishing cleavers while he patiently sits and waits for death.

Later in the movie, we have an extended sequence where the protagonists are kidnapped and sold to a collective of the richest elite, who auction off the chance to kill them in a low-grade homage to ‘The Most Dangerous Game.’ Every bidder is a caricature: the big-chinned gentleman and his bigger-chinned sons, the creepily sexual sisters—even the auctioneer, with her grandmotherly smiles as she encourages bloodshed and murder.

Neither of these scenes have remotely anything to do with any of the protagonists’ plot drive. Hell, the dead father isn’t even a stumbling block. It’s just a thing that happens and then isn’t referenced ever again. Why are these parts of the movie, except as indulgent pandering to a shallowly-formed hatred of the rich?

Also, if I may take a moment away from one diatribe for another, the masked assailants who pursue and eventually kidnap the protagonists (who are, to the film’s credit, a mixed-race and mixed-gender bunch) are quickly thereafter revealed to be a group of young black men who aren’t out there to purge, but just to “make some money,” which they promptly succeed at by selling the group to the rich, all-white hunting party.

I would never suggest that movies aren’t the place to process sensitive issues like the historical context of slavery in America. In fact, they’re a great place to process them—just watch one of my favorite films of 2012, Django Unchained—but is this really the right movie for that? Besides, if it were, wouldn’t they have actually processed the issue, rather than just… leaving it there, a weird and uncomfortable moment that I fear too few of the audience even noticed.

I don’t think I’m crazy to suggest that the central concept of The Purge—that is, the whole purging part—ought to be considered a bad idea. But I’m not convinced that the film thinks it is a bad idea, or even that it wants its audience to think so. In fact, I’m pretty sure the target audience is meant to walk away from the picture thinking, “Yeah, I’d like to do that if I could.”

What makes me say that? Let’s look at The Wolf of Wall Street. Not exactly a movie you’d think to compare to The Purge: Anarchy, but bear with me: both are examinations of decadent, morally repugnant cultures, one from recent American history, one from an imagined American future. In essence, they’re the same kind of movie.

But there’s one big difference. In Wolf, you can practically hear Martin Scorsese leaning around the camera after every shot and whispering: “Can you believe these assholes?*” The utter condemnation of the film’s subject matter is obvious—and if it’s not obvious to you, you’ve missed the point. The Purge: Anarchy doesn’t have that detachment. There is no wink.

Maybe the difference is as simple as their endings. The Wolf of Wall Street leaves you with no satisfying moral victory. Jordan Belfort gets away with everything, virtually carte blanche. Some viewers were bothered by this, I think, feeling that Scorsese didn’t appropriately punish his hero/villain. But why would he? The real Jordan Belfort got away with it, too.

In The Purge: Anarchy, on the other hand, we’re treated to a tied-with-a-bow happy ending. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell you that Frank Grillo ultimately decides against murdering the hapless killer of his child, and he’s rewarded for it with a new family in the form of the woman and daughter he’s protected all night. The killer even saves his life from an evil rich politician.

It’s everything you need to go home feeling warm and fuzzy. And yet, nothing in the world of the movie has changed. As the movie itself says, it’s “364 days until the next purge.” The rich are still in power. The poor are still downtrodden. Don’t even get me started on the anti-purge revolutionaries who are revealed to be as trigger-happy as the purgers they rail against.

The Purge: Anarchy is all sound and fury. It’s a shame most people don’t remember that the rest of that phrase is: “Told by an idiot… signifying nothing.”

*Not my original observation. I've cited Film Crit Hulk before, and here I'll do it again. He brought up this point about Wolf of Wall Street in his essay on David O. Russell.

The Savage Rejoinder

It’s taken some thinking for me to figure out what sort of movie The Purge: Anarchy is. It’s not a horror film because there’s no sense of dread. It’s not a thriller because suspense comes in microscopic bursts. It flirts with being an action film at times, but so much of the wanton violence you’d expect to see upfront in this film happens in the background or off-screen.

I’ve decided that it must be a satire, and not a very good one. Its characters—shallow caricatures of poor minorities, anxious middle class whites, jaded veterans, and the vampiric rich using and abusing them all—inhabit an oversimplified world of “us vs them”. It’s a flimsy setup, though not a fundamentally bad one.

A clever team of writers and a skilled director could have worked these elements into some sort of trashy dark comedy about the lather people can work themselves into when they watch too much FOX News or MSNBC. That’s not the film I saw.

This film wanted to get its audience riled up, but it’s not certain about what. Violence is never the answer! Until it is. The Purge: Anarchy delivers mixed messages, glorifying violence one moment and condemning it the next. Characters switch philosophies on the fly, so no one serves as a moral anchor. A resistance group working to put an end to the holiday gets in on the action at the film’s lukewarm climax, but the film doesn’t consider this too important. I guess it’ll have some significance in the inevitable threequel.

The Purge: Anarchy is a movie that’s very angry with someone or something, and it wants you to be angry too. It doesn’t matter what the object of your rage is, just so long as you leave feeling like you got it out of your system.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Savage recommends that the violent satire you’re looking for is Bobcat Goldthwait's God Bless America. Stream it on Netflix and skip The Purge.