Tragedy Bang Bang: The Purge: Anarchy (James DeMonaco, 2014)

First things first: Today is the final pre-order cut off for the third issue of Be Not Afraid, my comic series with Lisandro Estherren. This is the one where we learn the final fate of Unsettling Dead Grandma and/or come to some depressing conclusions about the relationship between body and soul. You can see a preview here, and pick up Issue #2 (on stands now) when you pre-order it at your local comic shop.

Now, on to the business of this summer: Binging the Purge.

First of all: If I told you that there was a man who looked like a low-rent Jon Bernthal, and that he played a ruthless, Punisher-esque military killer on a rampage of revenge — but with a heart of gold! — who was also the most skilled Purger in the Purgeiverse, you would have no choice but to believe me. I mean: Of course there is such a man. The very structure of the Purge franchise implies, nay, necessitates, his existence. 

But what if I asked you to make up a name for this man? If I charged you with the sacred duty of coming up with a name that embodies both the low-rent goofiness and the ludicrously be-stubbled machismo of a Jon-Bernthal-slash-Punisher substitute who exists solely in the Purgeiverse — what would you call him? Simon LeSancerre? Nigel Fizwittick-on-Ponsbury? Tim Kowalzcyk? Or would you, friend, cast your eyes around, combine within yourself the stereotypically masculine pastime of cooking hot dogs on an outdoor grill and the general concept of Italian-ness, and give this man the name he most truly deserves: Frank Grillo?

If Frank Grillo did not exist, The Purge would have had to invent him. But he does, and this is the installment where we meet him — the second Purge film, but the first real Purge movie. Unfortunately, this is also where we meet the store-brand Scott Aukerman who’s been in every terrible horror movie I’ve ever seen. 

But we’ll lead with the strengths. The Purge (2013) was essentially a home invasion thriller; it’s a genre with well-defined tropes (in essence: people in spooky masks break into an upscale home and terrify a white woman) from which The Purge never strayed, even if it did cast Ethan Hawke as the white woman in question. The story The Purge actually wanted to tell — the one about America descending into a night of seemingly random violence that actually functioned as a cover for state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing — was more interesting, but almost all of it occurred off-screen. The Purge: Anarchy puts that action at the center of the movie. It takes place on the streets of Los Angeles, following the various working-class people (and Scott Aukermans) who have the bad luck to be caught outside during the Purge.

It is also, like all Purge movies, ludicrously psychic. So let’s go back to July of 2014 — one month before the beginning of #BlackLivesMatter in Ferguson, eleven months before Donald Trump announced his first Presidential candidacy, and six years before the Guardian was publishing lengthy features on BreadTube — when a little movie called The Purge: Anarchy told us that, by 2023, America would be run by a fascist party that “got elected” by “preying on this country’s fears,” and that its President, Donald T_____, would have been in office for nine years, having chosen not to obey term limits, and that people of color and/or socialists would stage uprisings on the streets in response to the regime’s intolerable racist violence, with said uprisings primarily being propagated via some guy uploading lectures on communism to YouTube. 

And in the midst of all that, there would be Frank Grillo, driving an armored muscle car and shooting guns and stuff. Come forth, my friends, and Purge.