The Purge: Anarchy offers just enough of a glimpse of a wider, disturbing universe to make us wish it weren’t so focused on folks trying to kill each other.
Keith Stanfield in The Purge: Anarchy.
Universal Pictures
It's been a summer peppered with class turmoil at the movies, from Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and Snowpiercer to Tammy, and never more so than in The Purge franchise, which rolled out its second installment, The Purge: Anarchy, last weekend. The Purge series is fueled by bloodshed that's in turn fueled by class rage, imagining a near-future U.S. in which crime and unemployment are at record lows — courtesy of the introduction of a national holiday in which, for 12 hours, everything's legal and the police and emergency services close up shop.
The Purge-indoctrinated Americans dutifully repeat the message from the New Founding Fathers, the ominous regime that's reshaped the country. Purging, they say, is their right and their way to "release the beast" and expel negative emotions from the law-abiding rest of the year. But the reality is that The Purge is a way for the government to cull low-income populations who can't afford to seal themselves away.
Universal Pictures
