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| Right-wing mercenaries turn Bushwick into a battle zone in Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott's Bushwick (2017) |
When explaining to my friend Gus a synopsis of
Bushwick, I described it as follows: "There was lots of shooting, running, and hiding, and more shooting, running, and hiding, and a lot of people died. Some of those people died unexpectedly." While this description may not be the most charitable toward the film, it doesn't mean it's any less accurate, or that the film is not really VERY entertaining.
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| Lucy (Brittany Snow) learns combat survival skills PDQ |
The film follows the blond Buffy look-a-like Lucy (Brittany Snow) as she arrives home with her boyfriend to visit her grandmother in Bushwick--shades of Little Red Riding Hood seem very deliberate. Without really spoiling anything, her boyfriend is
immediately killed in an explosion, and Lucy is forced to fend for herself in what has become a violent militarized zone, where teams of snipers, dressed in black, are just randomly gunning down the populace at every turn. Meanwhile, desperate times produce a series of rapists and looters that hew a little too closely to some dangerous stereotypes, and if not for the gruff Stupe's assistance (played with stoic gravitas by Dave Bautista), she would be just another corpse littering the street.
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| Stupe and Lucy immersed in the shooting, running, and hiding loop |
What follows is Lucy trying to find out what's happened to her family members (her grandmother and sister, respectively), while the two survivors try to figure out what the fu** is going on. Turns out that a series of Southern states, under the influence of a charismatic right-wing ideologue, and funded by the pockets of some major corporation, are staging a military insurrection and seceding from the U.S. The mercenaries they are using, who are merely "following orders," have been told that Bushwick is a good flashpoint for this insurgency because its a place so divided by difference, that its various factions couldn't possibly unite together to stage an organized resistance. Of course, as right-wing fu**wits are so often dead wrong, the highlights of the film are the fierce pockets of resistance that emerge, and how people are willing to fight to the death against injustice. Yet what the film implies, but doesn't really explore with any depth, is that folks are willing to go to the same lengths to fight to maintain bigotry and inequality.
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| Right-wingers are willing to "Make America Great Again" by any means necessary |
While
Bushwick was in production well before the results of the 2016 election, its themes are beyond timely and really resonate with the political sh**show that is the U.S. right now. The film isn't overly pedantic, even though it certainly takes a side in this new version of a civil war. Some characters die that you might not expect, which gives the film a bit more inventiveness beyond its shoot-em-up aesthetic and almost non-existent backstory.
Bushwick is a fun ride, but not as cathartic as I had hoped. While the film is still way too chilling (similar to the ways in which the current adaptation of
The Handmaid's Tale feels imminently possible), it feels too much like a video game to really resonate or make you care.
