Well folks, it happened. I’ve taken every possible precaution, I still only leave the house rarely and fully masked, but I still caught goddamn Covid. As a result, I’ve spent the last four days feeling utterly wretched, guzzling ginger ale and Dayquil, and living pretty much exclusively out of my bedroom/home office. It’s painful, it’s isolating, and it comes with the fun bonus feature of desperately hoping I didn’t infect any of my friends or family before symptoms emerged. The plague has come home at last, and has only intensified my internal fury at all those who believe we have no social responsibility towards our fellow human beings.

Fortunately, while I’ve been feeling far too under the weather to actually engage with any new movies, I’ve still got a healthy film review buffer to deplete before doing anything so drastic as skipping a weekly post. So let’s reach into my bag of film delicacies, and see what I was watching before I was struck down by the hand of god.

Unsatisfied with the purge ratio of the original Purge film, we decided to quench our purge thirst with its followup, The Purge: Anarchy. And goddamn does Anarchy know to purge! This sequel is basically everything you could have hoped for from the first film: chaos in the streets, costumed gangs falling somewhere between Mad Max and The Warriors, and a senselessly satisfying kill count that sees all manner of sadistic baddies hitting the floor. There are semi trucks bearing miniguns, there are mining carts bearing flamethrowers, and there’s our special ops hero right in the thick of it, doing his best to keep some unfortunate strangers alive.

It’s clear that the Purge franchise has a lot of thoughts about American society, and it’s equally clear that the Purge films are far too ridiculous a vehicle to bear the weight of those themes. I thus applaud Anarchy for leaning into this franchise’s actual strength: how its ludicrous concept facilitates a wide variety of action setpieces, from family squabbles gone wrong to the one percent’s private hunting facility. Frank Grillo’s a reliable lead (he pretty much single-handedly carried Boss Level), and though James DeMonaco has some trouble with night shooting, his direction is otherwise quite capable. Sprinkle on a garnish of simple “only breaking the cycle of violence will free us,” and you’ve got a high quality piece of exploitation theater, one that doesn’t even require familiarity with the first film.

Unfortunately, the purgening takes a horrifying lurch in the other direction with its third film, The Purge: Election Year. Seemingly forgetting the lessons of the previous film, Election Year goes all-in on the political implications of Purge World, focusing on an anti-purge senator who all the pro-purge senators do their best to purge. Claiming she must spend purge night in her home “or the voters will know I’m a coward,” she is predictably betrayed and attacked within minutes, with only the returning Grillo standing between her and destruction.

The Purge franchise is frankly too silly to be worth deeply engaging with its politics, but this film calls itself “Election Year,” and so I’m gonna do it anyway. On a basic level, the idea of white conservative America using a “purge night” as essentially the new form of legal lynching makes sense. The rank-and-file republicans would happily kill us if they could – but of course, their masters don’t desire to actually kill us, but rather just disenfranchise and enslave us. Every oligarchy requires an underclass, and killing your underclass is a quick road to ruin, so the purge films as a whole make a clumsy metaphor for America’s political struggles.

On the other hand, Election Year’s attempts to be timely and political sure do reveal the limitations of our mainstream political thinking! Our heroine is attempting to win the presidential election fair and square, thus allowing her to institute anti-purge legislation. In response to this, her conservative opponents decide to simply kill her, because that will obviously solve their problem. This is essentially the difference between democratic and republican thinking: democrats believe that laws, rules, and decorum will save them, whereas republicans hold no true values beyond their right to power. As a result, the republicans always win, while the democrats are left complaining that it’s not fair how the other guys broke all the rules.

This overwhelming naivety of the democrats, their bone-deep inability to understand the true nature of their enemies, as well as their ludicrous faith in already-failed political institutions, is brought to a self-parodying peak by this film’s climax. When confronted with the leader and founders of the purge party, our heroine claims that the freedom fighters should not execute them, because “that would make them martyrs.” I guess making them martyrs is worse than preventing them from ever holding power and killing people again, somehow? It certainly didn’t seem to worry the purge side, when they were desperately trying to assassinate you, because assassinations work. In the film’s most triumphantly tone-deaf moment, our heroine roars that she will “beat the shit out of you on election day,” encompassing the grand tradition of symbolic resistance that led us all the way to Donald Trump.

In a post-Trump era, a film like this feels mostly like a grim reminder that nothing will ever change, because the alleged “good guys” either don’t understand the game they are playing, or more likely are willfully complicit in its continuation. A disappointing purge film, and an astonishingly misguided political statement.

We followed that up with a punchy neo-western, the recent streaming release The Harder They Fall. The film’s main cast is a ludicrously stacked list, featuring Idris Elba, Regina King, Jonathan Majors, Zazie Beetz, Lakeith Stanfield, and many more. Its loose plot is largely superfluous; this is a film about style and energy, contrasting larger-than-life cowboys and exulting in slow-motion mayhem.

First-time director Jeymes Samuel brings a stately focus on symmetry and ornate mise-en-scène to the material; his style feels like a cross between John Woo and Wes Anderson, and I’ll be interested in seeing his next production. Blessed with one of the most over-stacked casts imaginable, it’s easy to see these all-stars having fun with the gleefully pulpy material. Elba exudes both danger and majesty as the film’s far-seeing villain (even if the script can’t always live up to his performance), while King seems like she’s almost having too much fun, and Stanfield is predictably fantastic as Elba’s somber sharpshooter. Not a particularly revelatory film, and seemingly still limited by Netflix’s production model (the costuming isn’t even slightly convincing, for example), The Harder They Fall is nonetheless a great time with an absurdly talented group of actors.

Our last feature was an acclaimed yet under-watched historical epic, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Opening just three years after Gladiator, Master and Commander debuted to a resounding yawn, unappreciated by audiences that had seemingly lost the majority of their attention spans in the interim. But it was always critically well-liked, and has been picking up steam as a quietly excellent film in the years since. From my own experience, those murmurs were proven correct and then some: Master and Commander is one hell of an epic adventure, standing as one of the last great entries in this once-beloved genre.

The film sees Russel Crowe starring as Jack Aubrey, a British captain during the Napoleonic Wars, who is tasked with hunting down a French privateer. Known as the invincible “Lucky Jack,” Aubrey pursues his target to a point beyond all reason, rounding Cape Horn and nearly losing his ship in the process. With sense abandoned and losses mounting, Aubrey is challenged by his friend and ship’s doctor, Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany), who fears Aubrey is becoming lost in his own legend. As their journey continues, both their friendship and their lives will be tested, as they face off against a ship that outperforms them on every front.

I feel like Russel Crowe can’t help but be typecast as stoic man’s-man leads, but unlike someone like Gerard Butler, the dude can fucking act. His performance here finds great nuance in the classic military struggle between duty and humanity, bringing to mind Alec Guinness’ spectacular turn in The Bridge on the River Kwai. Aubrey is proud yet sensitive, strong yet sophisticated, and Crowe executes these contradictions such that you can see a man suspended between contrary instincts, and shackled further still by the demands of military propriety. These struggles etch tremors and undertones in his spoken dialogue, while his eyes remain haunted, revealing the underlying calculations that inform his “effortlessly” leaderly affectation. It’s a great performance, is what I’m saying.

Along with Crowe’s strong hand on the tiller, Master and Commander is elevated through direction and set design that fully embraces the texture of the material. Peter Weir was directing banger after banger until he dropped off the face of the earth, and the lovingly constructed boat sets grant a sense of tactile impact and claustrophobia to the film’s battle scenes. No reliance on CG flourishes here; everything that could possibly be done practically is done so, resulting in a sense of genuine transportation to the film’s era. It’s a goddamn shame that the era of the historical epic is largely over, and that future films of such scale will likely rely on paper-thin CG illustration. But I’m happy to say that, in the case of this film at least, the genre went out swinging.