The Purge: Election Year (2016) + BONUS! (SPOILERS)

Well, it's the time of year to be patriotic again, so of course there's another Purge movie to shit all over that and ruin it for everybody. This is Election Year!

And yes, there's SPOILERS for the movie in this review and the podcast. Beware! Or just read the spoilers and don't go see the fucking movie. I dunno. Do what you want. I'm still typing in bold and it makes this part of the review look important.

Director: James DeMonaco

Starring: Frank Grillo, Elizabeth Mitchell

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

Here's a podcast Michelle and I did about it:

The both of us really, really fucking hated The Purge: Anarchy back in 2014. It was just so awful, from the over the top political message to the implication that all Americans really are just awful, shitty people. I feel secure in reinforcing that it's one of the worst movies I've ever seen. You know, so far as anyone claiming something is the worst ever on the internet can be taken seriously. Which isn't much – hyperbole is like 99-cent candy bars here. It's cheap currency and you can buy it at shitty, seedy gas stations from teenagers high on pot.

So, Election Year. I'll start off by showing this scene of the Lincoln Memorial covered in blood, gore and burning trash. I wonder who's going to clean that up? This is the most odious crime committed on Purge Night. I have no sympathy for litterbugs!

Throughout the movie they constantly say it's their American right to Purge and blather on about freedom, but then this happens and no one cares. Bull fucking shit. Americans are so zealously patriotic and symbol-obsessed that they'd murder someone who did this on a day that wasn't The Purge night.

We see the New Founding Fathers, apparently the totalitarian leaders of America in the future, plotting against this senator lady, Charlie Roan, played by Elizabeth Mitchell, who is running for president. She has the audacity to want to end the Purge because her family died in it 20 years ago. What an irrational bitch, am I right?

Stop your emotional liberal appeals in the face of our liberties! Wait, this is getting a bit too real.

These guys cackle like Halloween Jack O'Lanterns and speak in all the overemphasized cadence and exaggerated verbosity of a Saturday morning cartoon villain. Oh, wait, there are no Saturday morning cartoons anymore. Which means there is no God.

Anyway, the scenes of Senator Roan debating the other dude who wants to keep the Purge – who is some sort of ultraconservative preacher character who acts like a lost Bugs Bunny villain – are just the bottom of the barrel. The rest of the movie, then, is below the bottom of the barrel. It's underneath the fucking barrel.

The fact that it's such a controversy to stop making murder legal once a year, to the point where one candidate is laughing at another for suggesting it, is batshit crazy. I'm sure you could spin this into a decent satire of some sort, but the movie lacks the self awareness and the good writing to make it seem realistic.

There are also multiple scenes of this corner store in a middle class/poor area of town. There's the owner, Joe Dixon, and a host of side characters like this Hispanic immigrant guy who works with him and a woman who is a regular customer and who drives a van on Purge night to help people. I just think all of these scenes are such a load of horse shit. They're all so fake-folksy, like a corporation trying to relate to the 'common people' by pretending to be idyllic and cute and all of that. It's like Coca Cola putting a rap song into a commercial - you're not fooling anyone.

Oh, but there is a scene of two crazy, psychotic middle school girls who try to steal one candy bar from the store. This becomes a central plot point for the first half of the movie. No, I'm not even kidding.

The big change to Purge night this year is that anyone can be targeted, even government officials, who previously you couldn't target. That should've been a whiff of bullshit so strong that even the dumbest “patriotic” rednecks would have cried foul and ended the whole thing years ago. But remember, in the universe of the Purge, Americans are all universally self-centered idiots who take Fox News as the gospel and swallow their bullshit like donuts at Free Donut Day. Definitely isn't the writers themselves projecting their own idiocy! Nope! It's all Americans that are like this!

So, yeah, we get reintroduced to the guy from the last movie, Barnes, played by Frank Grillo. He has as much character as the lamp I bought last week. He has no charisma on screen and adds so little to this movie or the last one that you could replace him in every scene with a Photoshopped picture of a duck playing the saxophone, and the movie would at least have something kind of endearing in it. This time, he's the Secret Service or something for Charlie Roan. How did he go from revolutionary lone wolf to a Secret Service member? This is making all those times real Secret Service got caught fucking Colombian hookers and letting crazy people onto the White House lawn look like premiere hiring, real career guys.

We see more of his expert prowess when they set up this whole security detail at Charlie Roan's house, protecting her from the Purge night. It doesn't last more than 20 minutes before it's revealed that almost every security guy they hired is corrupt and actually working for the New Founding Fathers to kill Charlie! Wow, maybe you should've spent more than twenty minutes vetting these security guys and not been multi-tasking on your phone playing Online Billiards or whatever the fuck.

So then they go and hide out conveniently in the folksy corner store from before – wow, you mean there was a reason they showed those two separate storylines earlier on? What expert level, Shakespearean storytelling! This leads to some truly masterful dialogue between Barnes and Joe Dixon, in which Dixon constantly assumes Barnes is being racist to him. Only the dialogue here isn't good enough to actually convey any tension, and so their constant bickering actually just makes the movie itself look subtly racist. Just because one of them's a black dude and the other isn't doesn't mean every conversation they have has to sound like Bruce Willis and Sam Jackson in Die Hard 3 – you fucking hacks. It isn't the early 1990s anymore, for one thing, and for another, your movie isn't as smart as Die Hard 3. Certainly not enough to pull this off.

Not to mention pretty much all the black characters come from some rough past in 'the streets.' And the one Hispanic guy is from a horrible war-torn part of Mexico that he compares the Purge to. You know, just because you graduated beyond writing black characters like Song of the South or something, doesn't mean you're not racist anyway.

Oh, and the foreigner characters who have vaguely non-denominational European accents (they're just "foreigners") are only in the movie because they've come from overseas to participate in Purge night. They're portrayed as bloodthirsty, remorseless serial killers. EVERYONE FROM ANOTHER CULTURE IS EVIL! HIDE IN YOUR HOMES! VOTE TRUMP!

"This'll sure look cool at the Halloween Horror Nights attraction!"

But fortunately you don't have long to think about that, as the psychotic high school girls arrive in a car covered with Christmas lights, dressed like dominatrixes and acting like literal wild animals would if they had a basic command of English. And yes, the main one is still after the one candy bar – that's her whole motivation. She's going to kill people just to get a fucking candy bar.

This is one of those scenes like from the last movie where I just can't suspend my disbelief. What did these girls do the other 364 days a year that weren't Purge night? How did they function normally in society? The movie implies that there doesn't need to be an answer, because humans are just shittier in the future for unspecified, vague reasons including the words 'moral decline.' Fuck that and fuck you, movie.

The girls do get run over though! So there is that, for some mildly okay gore. If that's all you need, then The Purge: Election Year has your dismal standards covered!

A lot of other shit happens after that. I don't care to get into all of it. It's mostly badly shot, poorly paced, boring action movie crap and it's not even exciting to look at, with everything being so dark and grimy all the time.

Walking around at night with shitty haunted house traps set up in the city and predictably coming out unscathed = drama and suspense, I guess.

The climax involves a plot by this rebel group to blow up a church where this group of rich 1%ers is having this sermon praising the Purge for letting them get their 'demons' out, or some bullshit. The rival Senator is leading the whole thing. Only then they kidnap Charlie Roan and tie her up and intend to murder her for their big sermon thing.

That means one candidate for president is kidnapping and attempting to murder the other. It's like if Donald Trump went to Hillary Clinton's house, held her at gunpoint and killed her, and then expected everyone else to just act like nothing happened the next day and continue the election without her later. It's utter lunacy. The fact that someone wrote this and another person greenlighted it as if to say “yes, this is a smart plotline” makes me convinced we're doomed and Trump is going to win.

Fortunately, through a series of contrivances, the villains move much too slowly to actually kill her, so the good guys can save her. So glad they spend a ton of time monologuing, and then when they go to slit her throat, they do it as poorly as possible. Then they have a big shoot out fight, punctuated with Joe Dixon inserting incredibly lame and unfunny “jokes” throughout every time there's a pause. They're seriously not funny at all. I've heard things said at funerals that were funnier.

He dies at the end anyway, taking a bullet for Charlie Roan in another slow, poorly drawn-out scene that she should've died from but the script wouldn't allow it. Because really, what good is a black character in a horror movie if he doesn't die tragically? Otherwise you might actually have to do crazy things like make them "likable" or give them "personalities."

Then it turns out Charlie Roan actually wins the fucking election that year. It would have been hilarious if she lost. Wouldn't that have been a dark twist? Too bad, sometimes the progressive light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel candidate just can't win? Would've been salt in the wounds for Bernie supporters watching this anyway.

But yeah, she wins and ends the Purge, I guess. I don't understand how. If people wanted the Purge night to change this badly, why did it go on for so long? 20 fucking years of that before people finally decided to change it? Really? The only implication I can see is that there was no candidate advocating for the end of the Purge that whole time. The whole fucking 20 years of legal murder, and not one candidate until this Charlie Roan lady even breached the subject. Wow. That's a lot of bullshit to swallow!

This movie is awful just like the last one. The whole political message just makes no sense – it's a skewering of the American right wing through the lens of this far left view, but the way all the poor and homeless and minorities are depicted – as degenerates or very broadly drawn, unflattering stereotypes – swings it right back to more of a right wing view, like the caricatures of Fox News-style fearmongering. It's a confusing, poorly thought out message.

Mostly, the movie implies that Americans are just a bunch of stupid, assholeish simpletons who would allow their country to get this far gone. The proof I have of this is that at no point during these Purge movies do you see people trying to really help those under attack. Only the worst of society is ever shown. The whole point is that medical services and ambulances and police don't have to do their jobs. So you're telling me that out of all those doctors and cops and well-meaning citizens who actually have souls, none of them are willing to go help out anyway? All of them are really that selfish and shitty? It's really just every man for himself? That's perhaps the biggest load of bullshit in the movie, and that's not a small feat.

People are better than this movie or the other piece of trash that precluded it think. People would help out where they could, form tons of organized coalitions to save people on Purge night, and they really would not let this stuff go on for like 20 years before saying hey, we need to stop this.

I know this is just a bullshit fictional universe, but come on – you need to have a plausible, believable fantasy. This movie doesn't. And it would be more interesting with more characters fighting back against the Purge, helping people and generally not rolling over and playing dead and letting us only see the worst people in the world on screen. But I guess the movie really needed to push that 'Americans are shitty people' message!

Even aside from that, it's a boring, shitty action movie with no good characters or scenes. There's no suspense and every part of the plot is poorly written cliché. There's nothing to like about this. It's all hack work trash, and I don't have any qualms with saying so. Fuck The Purge: Election Year.

BONUS: WHY THE PURGE IS A STUPID FUCKING IDEA IN GENERAL

As a bonus, Michelle and I were talking the other night about this movie some more, and really, the whole idea of the Purge in general gets more insane the more you think about it - i.e. even thinking a tiny, little bit at all crumbles the entire concept. Let's go over some of the implications of this world:

• Can prisoners rise up and kill the guards and break out of jail on Purge night? That seems like something that should be addressed. There's certainly enough prisoners to do so, like at least 400 against, what, 80 guards at most? Seems like that would be a mess to clean up the next day.

• What about crimes that have nothing to do with murder? Remember, all crime is legal. What if a stockbroker steals a bunch of money from his trading company and throws the world economy off balance?

• I guess rape is legal now on Purge night, so any number of horrible things could happen. If the point of Purge night is reducing crime – well, I'm pretty sure the victims of rape wouldn't be thanking you, jackasses.

• I wonder what it's like for people to have to live with ramifications of the Purge after it happens. Like if a boss kills a competitor – is that looked upon as a legitimate transaction later? Like 'oh, I guess it's okay cause of Purge night'? “Gee, it really sucks that Mike killed our boss last night. He was about to give me that raise and help me feed my starving children.”

• What about when one of your co-workers brutally murders another co-worker? How does the rest of the office look that first co-worker in the eye the rest of the year? Someone's not getting invited to the office party. I'm picturing it like that scene from Office Space where they all pass over Milton and don't let him have any cake. That seems like what would happen.

• Are American territories included in the Purge? Do people on the Virgin Islands or Puerto Rico get to participate? What if some rogue state official wanted to bomb another country and had the keys to the nuclear weapons? Would the whole world have to just shrug their shoulders and forget about it because oh, those goofy Americans and their all-crime-is-legal holiday?!

Holy fuck. They really didn't think any of this through. This is what happens when you don't do enough world-building for your fictional world. The Purge just gets worse and worse the more you actually look at the logic behind it. This has to be among the worst bullshit in modern cinema!

Images copyright of their original owners, we own none of them and are making no money off this.

The Purge: Anarchy (2014)

Society is sick and has problems. There you go, that's all you need in terms of social commentary. You goddamn geniuses. Now you're basically done with storytelling for the rest of the movie in your first five minutes; you know, like any good movie. What can we do to fill up the rest? Just throw in gunfights and chase scenes from the bargain bin of 12-year-old thriller films ripping off Panic Room! Then have some serious faced scenes reiterating the social commentary at the end by saying “God Bless America” a lot!

Yeah, I guess that's good enough. We can go back to snorting cocaine in the bathroom now.

Or that's my interpretation behind the making of this film, anyway.

Director: James DeMonaco

Starring: Frank Grillo, Carmen Ejogo, Kiele Sanchez

IMDb

We start off this sequel to last year's The Purge with a bunch of people waiting to prepare for the annual Purge, the time space where all crime is legal for a year. Because it apparently makes the country better and helps the economy. If you can figure that one out, well, Ted Cruz has a space open for you right next to him on the campaign trail.

I guess the big change between the last movie and this one is that there are multiple different characters and storylines going on which converge eventually. But unlike most movies that try this, this one doesn't really try to develop it – the film just rushes through all the backstories with about as much caring as a hungover college student working on economics homework. 

If you want an example of the brilliant dialogue we have to look forward to, check this out, from some old lady talking about walking her dog or something: “He doesn't even like me anymore. He just wants to sniff your ass!” Well, thank you. Thank you so much for that gem of dialogue...

The two main girls are apparently mother and daughter, even though they look at most three or four years apart. I guess it's true, kids really are getting younger and younger. Their father is an old man who hates the Purge and also hates the new radical movement promising to destroy it. His solution is apparently to go offer himself to be killed by a bunch of rich people so his family can get money or something.

"There are probably easier ways I could have gotten you money, like cashing in those old savings bonds I have hidden in the attic, but I just like being dramatic!"

We never see him again and never see the money delivered to the girls, so this was an unpleasant, dark and nonsensical subplot that went nowhere. As you'll find out throughout the film, it's more interested in showing you DARK EDGY SHIT as a flimsy cover to disguise the fact that it has absolutely nothing to say. You know, showing bad things happening is good enough. That really drives home the point that bad things happen in real life. You guys are delivering messages we never heard of before!

There's also this other couple, who are considering getting a divorce and for some reason the most important aspect of this idea is telling the wife's sister. The husband, however, is having second thoughts and wants to reminisce about all the good times they had together.

You know, for all the insults I could hurl at this badly written plot, all that comes to mind is this: 

Their car breaks down on the side of the road, and now they're stranded on Purge night! Oh no! Even though you're clearly in an urban area and could easily find a place to hide all night, I guess this is now a big fucking deal. It's even more serious when the Joker's henchmen from The Dark Knight show up:

Not as scary without Heath Ledger, are they?

I guess the last main character is this guy, who is gearing up for some kind of revenge by trying all of these guns for the first time right now despite the fact that the Purge starts up any minute. Pfft. Being prepared is for nerds! 

"I bought these guns from some guy who repeatedly assured me while sweating profusely that he was NOT a cop in disguise trying to bust illegal gun buyers!"

The two Hispanic girls are in their house when their fat Breaking Bad wannabe landlord barges in and tries to kill them for not saying hi to him in the hallway, or some shit like that. Really not sure how this guy expects to keep any tenants the rest of the year if THIS is how he treats them now, but whatever; clearly that isn't a big deal at all in this universe.

"Conditions of your lease if you live here include no pets, don't leave any lasting damage on the walls, floor or bathroom, clean up after yourself and give me blowjobs whenever I break into your apartment and violently demand them!"

And ooh, such edgy social commentary about how people would KILL other people if it was legal because human beings are all scumbags deep down with no redeeming qualities! You're really doing a lot of good for the world by preaching that incredibly stupid, inaccurate generalization that has no basis in reality! You definitely shouldn't be eaten by a pack of rabid hyenas for perpetuating this kind of tinfoil hat nihilistic nonsense!

What follows after that is some pretty generic action/thriller bullshit, mostly full of dark alleys and running around and exclaiming banal things that wouldn't need to be said in real life, but are said here to explain what's going on. Like a character will say “oh no, we're surrounded!” No shit, really? I couldn't tell because I have tunnel vision and only see in one direction.

We have to use our legs to run or else they'll catch us, and if they catch us it'll be bad!

Or the badass “leader” dude will go “Duck! Keep moving! Go!” like a billion times when they're running away from people with guns. Oh really? When I saw that guy coming at me with an Uzi and shouting that he wanted to kill me, my first instinct was to stay here and enjoy the scenery, maybe camp out for a picnic!

Oh no, he's got a gun and that gun could probably kill us, and if it kills us, we're dead as fuck!

Dialogue is easy when you're a shitty writer with no real story in mind. You can just have various characters describe what's happening on screen and that will apparently, through some hellish sorcery of which I know not, make them three-dimensional characters. Teach us more of your magic, O Great Wizard.

There are some brief attempts at building character here and there, which mostly amount to this girl wiggling her eyebrows while the “daughter” (HA!) and that bland leader guy do some very, very minor flirting. Her eyebrows are the best actors in the movie.

At some point, they go to one of the characters' friend's houses or something, who is some annoying girl getting drunk off her ass while the rest of her family just sits around and acts miserable about that. Her husband comes in, who I'm sure is actually her cousin or something. Hello, West Virginia! 

What, did you escape from Texas Chainsaw Massacre?

Then that girl's sister, who she called fat a bunch of times in some passive aggressive way, goes insane and shoots up her entire family, because you know, your sister being a bitch is definitely a reason to murder your entire family. Because really, this scene is a mirror of how all American society really is, under the surface. This movie sees the TRUTH, man. Preach it! 

"NO, HONEY, WE HAVE COMPANY!!!"

One of my favorite moments is when the grandfather kneels over his dead, drunk daughter's corpse after she was shot like five times and goes “Is she dead?” Well, maybe not. Try doing a rain dance over her body and then reciting from the Necronomicon – that ought to show if you she is or not. And it'd be more entertaining than anything else in the movie.

Out in the streets we get some more boring chase scenes, followed by more dialogue comprised of nothing but pointing out the obvious. It's really starting to get old at this point and I'm starting to see exactly how much I'm not exaggerating at all when I say all the dialogue is like this. It's seriously all there is in the fucking movie! No character development, no story being told, just telling us what we're seeing on screen!

Then they get kidnapped by a bunch of guys and shoved in a truck. I love the scene inside the truck when they're tied up and the main girl is like “Why are you doing this?” and the guy is like “Oh, we need money.”

Yeah you know...the same kids that these rich people would normally be trying to kill are now working for them. Awesome.

You need money? I guess getting a job or something was out of the question. “Hey, man, I heard Walmart was hiring down the street.” “NO! Fuck that! We're going to kidnap innocent people and truck them off to be killed on Purge Night!” “Won't that leave us with little income the rest of the year since this is a one night event?” “Ssshhhhh.”

Yeah, you know how it is – making sense isn't for cool kids anymore.

And get this – apparently they're shipped off to some fancy looking building owned by a bunch of rich people. Because in this world, being rich means you want to kill people randomly for sport. They don't have a reason to or anything – they're just bored. Being rich means being evil, and it doesn't matter how many rich people in real life donate to charity, help out good causes or propagate good things in the world – they're all just evil and want to kill the poor people. Glad the movie is keepin' it real.

"So what do you want to do after this?"
"Kicking puppies and stealing from orphans sounds good."
"Yes indeed...after all we are rich and that's all we do!"

Then they get hauled out into a discount Hunger Games arena and are hunted by a bunch of people wearing night vision goggles. Although we see those goggles don't really matter when the main guy can just jump them and take their guns and kill them instantly even without goggles. Either he's just got super vision or the room isn't that dark and you're just tools for thinking you needed night vision goggles. 

"You'll have to excuse how bad I am at this whole hunting humans thing! I've only ever done paintballing before this! I'm not exactly Count Zarloff!"

So then the one white married dude is kneeling down with his wife, and she tells him she still loves him – I guess being nearly killed several times is the cure for divorce. Start spreading the word! Except apparently her declaration of love is poison, as he then gets shot to shit.

"Hey honey, the shitty script thinks people in real life actually make up and decide not to divorce after a ridiculous scenario like this!"

What an ironic coinkydink...

I don't know how only HE got shot, seeing as they were all kneeling in the same place, but whatever! Continuity and making sense is for assholes.

Then the rebel leader guy comes in and the wife says she now wants to Purge, so she joins them and starts shooting shit up. Which is confusing, seeing as the rebel guys are all about ENDING the fucking Purge, but I guess this is supposed to be the movie's way of telling us that it's a gritty, hard-line, violent world and even the supposed good guys aren't that good. Except it doesn't work when you're not really saying anything besides that – just making a statement and showing us something doesn't work by itself. You need context and some kind of point.

If you can believe it, we actually have another last-minute plotline to cram into this movie's nonsense – the badass cool leader guy was actually on a mission all night long to go kill the guy who killed his son. Apparently it's some white-collar doofus who was driving at three times the legal Blood Alcohol limit and then somehow “got off on a technicality” after running over his son – because “getting off on a technicality” is the kind of vague story element you use when you don't know what you're doing.

Badass cool leader guy goes inside and wakes up the guy and points a knife at his face, forcing him to tell him “what his son looked like.” I dunno, the guy's only real answer is “I DON'T REMEMBER, I WAS REALLY DRUNK!”

"JUST LOOK AS CONSTIPATED AS POSSIBLE!" 

Then we cut away and see badass cool leader guy coming out of the house. He gets shot by some other jackass, who comes up and goes on a long monologue about why the Purge is good for the country and all kinds of other psychobabble saying the same thing in different ways, that basically amounts to one thing: word vomit. You're really not even saying anything at this point, movie – you're just saying words to hear them come out, like a really annoying little child. And like most annoying little children, those of us who are adults will look upon this with condescension and promptly not take any of it seriously.

Frankly I'm just amazed this movie remembered there was colors aside from dark blue and green.

 
Then that guy gets shot by the hapless DUI child-murderer guy who the cool leader guy initially came to shoot – yes, apparently at the last second he had second thoughts, and now the would be victim saves the leader...for some reason. I don't know; it's hard to care about this story when we didn't know any of it until the last 10 fucking minutes of this movie.

People, this is not only the worst movie of 2014, it's also one of the worst films I've ever seen. I just hate this whole thing. Not only is it a poorly written mess with no characters, bad camerawork and a flimsy, dull storyline, it's also a complete hack-work when you look at it from the point of view of its ideology and message.

The film wants us to think it's smart and edgy with this whole “THIS IS WHAT WE'RE HEADING TOWARD IN 'MURICA” message, trying to tell us what we're seeing in this movie is a reflection of our societal climate right now – i.e. lots of violence and disarray and nothing else whatsoever. Well, if you think this movie is an accurate depiction of where the world is going right now, my suggestion is don't breed. Sterilize yourself. It's probably better for humankind as a whole.

She can see you any time now. In fact, you're first in line!

The movie's idea of social satire is to tell us things get SO bad that the government would actually “solve” the problem by making crime legal as a way to kill off those on the underbelly of society. Except really, there is no solution offered here, no greater purpose or message except “people are shit and they will kill each other for no reason.” If you want to have a nihilistic, depressing message, fine; but do it with more taste than this.

Because there's just no class to this. It's taking a complex issue like class warfare and the divide between rich and poor and boiling it down to “LOL! They're all just violent and would kill one another at the drop of a hat if given the chance!” No – there are far more pressing issues than that. The rich people are depicted as soulless cardboard cutout Saturday morning cartoon villains, and the poor are depicted as either crazy or babe-in-the-woods helpless, which is actually another level of offensiveness...so there are no poor people in this world with the street smarts, weapons or resources to fight back? Are they really that much at the mercy of these rich people hiring mercenaries and shit? Seems to me like the writers just didn't know that much about real urban crime and violence - maybe stepping out of your parents' basement once in a while would have helped.

This picture probably isn't actually of the movie's writer.

Beyond even that, we come to the issue of the incredibly thin and transparent plot – this is a film where bad things happen just to drive home the despicable point I talked about above, which is that people are shit and bad things happen. There's really no attention paid to character or build up here. The girls' grandfather sells himself to be killed, and then it presumably happens and we don't see him again. The husband dies at the end and the wife becomes a bloodthirsty killing machine, and that's the last we see of her. These aren't characters, they're strawmen set up to prove the movie's shitty message: LOOK! THEY'RE ALL BAD PEOPLE! BAD THINGS HAPPEN IN LIFE! You puddle of shit.

It's just so fucking deplorable of a thing to say in a film. The worst part of it all is that there really was no care or direction to the message delivered here. This movie was just made so the filmmakers (and the audience, by extension) could feel smart and above the sheeple in society by pointing out where (according to their gross misinformation) we're really heading.

The people who wrote this don't really care about society's problems; they're just using those problems to feel like they're smarter than they really are, like they're in the privileged position of “knowing” while the rest of us are all ignorant masses.

Like a lot of bad dystopian stories, there's a big sense of smug self satisfaction reeking off this like corpse rot.

I really, really can't see much of an argument for enjoying this film or finding it intelligent or thought provoking. It's the lowest kind of trash in cinema. Let me tell you something, makers of The Purge: Anarchy – this is NOT a reflection of society, nor is it a statement about human nature. People are better than you think, and the world does have problems, but they're more complex and nuanced than you probably understand or comprehend. This movie is awful, plain and simple.

To put it simply, you failed at everything you were trying to do.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.