Retention Categories are ignored when deleting the whole archive. There are however a few things that can prevent/delay archive deletion:
First of all: EV does only run the archive deletion if it has free processing capacity, so depending on your schedules etc. it might not start deleting items right away. There was a TN on this but somehow I cant find it atm. Furthermore if you are using discovery accelerator it could be that items in this archive are still on hold by DA, this also will prevent deletion.
The best thing to find out whats going on is to make sure that EV is not in backup mode and restart the storage service. Pay attention to the eventlog during the next few minutes, there will be entries of "storage delete" indicating whether deletion has started or problems did occur
/edit: forgot to mention: if you are archiving to worm storage (centera in compliance mode, netapp snaplock etc) it is also possible that archives get stuck in "marked for deletion" state