'Purge' Sequel Hammers One Percent: 'Get Ready to Die, Rich Bitches'

The Purge: Anarchy doubles down on the liberal themes hinted at in the first installment, according to the first wave of reviews.

And critics don’t seem to mind. In fact, they claim the overt class warfare and enmity toward wealthy characters represents the film’s selling points.

The 2013 original imagined a future America that allowed for a 12-hour period each year when everything, including murder, was legal.

The new film repeats that setting, but this time the rage against those who succeed in our capitalistic system bubbles over.

Slant Magazine describes the film’s tone:

[Director James] DeMonaco is a cartoon satirist with no sympathy for the rich, who in their abject bloodlust throughout come to resemble expats from the grotesque horror zone of Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” music video. These ghouls, so white and blond, and with surnames like Hearst, aren’t as realistic a demography as the story’s down-and-out heroes …

The outlet says The Purge: Anarchy isn’t perfect, but its willingness to hug liberal talking points makes it much more palatable.

DeMonaco may at times overcompensate for the The Purge’s flaws by doubly, sometimes triply, underlining the story’s governing theme of social power and how it’s exchanged, but the rage and lucidity of these ideas resonate in ways that the filmmaker’s workmanlike images, excepting the chilling vision of a burning bus silently darting across the frame in the background of one shot, do not.

Indiewire.com similarly applauds the franchise’s liberal agenda.

Like the first “Purge,” the ideas are blunt, messy and patently absurd, but that’s also part of the fun.

That “fun” would receive a different description, no doubt, had the film embraced free markets and individual responsibility.

The site’s review repeats a dialogue snippet which could have been a battle cry for Occupy Wall Street–if only the rag-tag group survived long enough to see Anarchy.

And it allows for serious payoff in the form of a renegade group designed to protect lower class citizens, headed by a militant Michael K. Williams. There’s nothing quite like watching Omar from “The Wire,” buried under a beret that explicitly invokes memories of the Black Panther movement, bursting into a room with a gun held high and shouting “Get ready to die, rich bitches!