Omar comin’! If there’s ever been a film that could give the world a spiritual revival of Michael K. Williams’ urban outlaw from HBO’s The Wire, it’s the upcoming sequel The Purge 2 from Universal Pictures and Blumhouse Productions. Who better to run, duck and hide from on the scariest day of the year than one of TV’s most frightening anti-heroes? Of course, it probably won’t turn out that way, but Williams definitely joined the cast, along with Friday Night Lights star Zach Gilford, Away We Go’s Carmen Ejogo and The Glades actress Kiele Sanchez.
They all join the previously cast Frank Grillo (The Grey), as THR reports, which technically gives this film more star power than the first film, in which Ethan Hawke was the only redeeming value. Returning writer-director James DeMonaco really needs to trim a lot of fat off of this premise if he expects audiences to make this sequel as big a success as its predecessor. (The Purge earned $89 million on a $3 million budget.)
There’s no sign of what the plot is going to be about, and though it can’t be ruled out that these are all members of the same family through marriage, I’m guessing the story may, and should, branch out from just a single location, taking us a little further into the ridiculously dangerous world on the night of no regrets. We can possibly count on one thing, though: all of these characters are adults, so no one could possibly be as stupid as Max Burkholder’s son character was, but let it be known I will stand around kicking and screaming all to myself if any of these people do anything as stupid as letting bleeding strangers in their house, knowing they probably wouldn’t do it on any random day.
Williams, who had better not be cast as a mute librarian or something similarly useless, has been all over the place in 2013, from tearing shit up as Chalky White in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire to a reverend in the faith-centered YouTube series Walk This Way. He’s following up a performance in Oscar contender 12 Years a Slave with the upcoming Robocop remake and is currently filming Tim Blake Nelson’s next drama Anesthesia.
Following his star quarterback status on Friday Night Lights, Gilford moved onto working with The Mob Doctor and in the Arnold Schwarzenegger bullet-fest The Last Stand. He’ll next be seen in the Rosemary’s Baby lookalike Devil’s Due.
Ejogo most recently starred in the ABC thriller Zero Hour, and was last seen on the big screen in the 2012 films Sparkle and Alex Cross. Sanchez, who I will forever remember as Lost’s completely forgettable Nikki, has kept busy with The Glades and this will be her first feature role since 2010’s Redemption Road.
You can expect to see The Purge 2 in theaters on June 20, 2014, as counterprogramming to the big budget fare in all the other theaters.
