Movie a Day Blog would probably not have willingly chosen to see THE PURGE: ANARCHY (2014), even though I saw the first film in the series, THE PURGE (2013), and thought it had an original idea that it squandered by confining the mayhem to one specific location.

    That problem has been remedied in the sequel, and PURGE: ANARCHY is a significant improvement on its predecessor, dramatically and in terms of surpassing genre expectations.

    Writer-director James DeMonaco, who has created what is clearly becoming a franchise, makes this an Los Angeles urban nightmare chase movie: anyone in America, on one night from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., is allowed to go berserk, and slaughter, rape and pillage anyone else stupid to be out on the streets on Purge Night. It’s sort of like Prom Night gone really, really bad.

    DeMonaco supplies these five unlucky characters with qualities that mostly succeed in making us empathize with them, and share their terror while shaking our heads at their dumbness in getting themselves into this plight.

    Their salvation comes in the form of Frank Grillo, a B-actor extraordinnaire, who was quite effective as the third major character, after Liam Neeson and the wolf, in THE GREY (2011, Movie a Day 1/11/12). He becomes the group’s Moses character, trying to lead them to safety while simultaneously conducting his own Purge operation; unfortunately, DeMonaco saddles him with a clichéd motivation, and it ends up sapping the power of the movie’s ending.

    There are several unusual and encouraging elements to PURGE: ANARCHY that I did not expect and was gratified to see. This is the rare film that overtly deals with class resentment in the United States; the primary victims of the Purge are people of color, and DeMonaco has cleverly inserted a government conspiracy to further cement his point about who’s considered expendable in the America of a new set of Founding Fathers.

     It’s the elite of the elite who get the most pleasure out of the Purge, it turns out; they hold private execution parties and play variations on the Most Dangerous Game, hunting unarmed humans in a confined space.

    DeMonaco wrote the screenplay for the remake of ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (2005), and his skill in ramping up the action with increasing forcefulness is the most successful aspect of PURGE: ANARCHY.

    He is helped immeasurably by the steadying performance of Grillo, and another surprise: two black/Hispanic women, mother and daughter Carmen Ejogo and Zoe Soul, both coming off as real characters and not ethnic stereotypes. That’s an accomplishment few action movies achieve, and it makes PURGE: ANARCHY more interesting on a societal level than DAWN OF THE APES (2014, Movie a Day 7/13/14).