At some point, a student of film has to reckon with Orson Welles and Touch of Evil for at least two reasons: One will be a cultural critique pertaining to the casting of white actors as ethnic minorities – we’re looking at you Charlton Heston and Marlene Dietrich; and the second will be the opening tracking shot. It starts with a time bomb being placed in the trunk of a car and for three-and-a-half minutes the camera follows the car through a border town. The tension builds as the car stops at red lights and passes nighttime revelers. The longer the shot lasts the more we sense that timer ticking. By the time the explosion causes the first cut, Welles has established his world and introduced his protagonists. It was a revolutionary shot at the time and technically hard to achieve given the size of the cameras, cranes and dollies in 1958. For what will likely be something they will only hear this one time in their careers, Welles has nothing on Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott, directors of Bushwick.
Bushwick belongs to the burgeoning New Civil War genre. The paranoia that used to drive action movies is no longer reserved for foreign invaders but is derived from the deep ideological divides separating this country. In this case, a coalition of Southern and lower Midwestern states led by Texas have coalesced and want to secede from the United States. To illustrate their serious intent, they have sent a mercenary army into Bushwick, Brooklyn to kidnap the neighborhood and hold it hostage until the president agrees to their demands. What the invaders were not expecting was a well-armed resistance because of blue New York and its gun control laws.
That’s the god’s eye view of the plot. The movie takes place on the ground where the camera follows Lucy (Brittany Snow) while she walks along a subway platform with her fiancé, Jose (Arturo Castro). They banter in cut and paste dialogue about him meeting her family for the first time – and whether or not they will like him – while giving some lip service to the fact that there’s no one else on the platform. They’re about to ascend the steps to the street when an explosion from above rocks their world. Then a man stumbles down the steps. He is engulfed in flames. This fact doesn’t impact Lucy and her man very much. Their reaction is more in line with witnessing a mugging. New York may have a reputation for events like a blazing man being commonplace, but it can be stated with assurance that they are not.
The tone for the film is set beyond just that non-reaction. Jose decides to take the stairs to find help. There’s another explosion and he returns, misshapen and smoldering, fulfilling his role as dead meat. But what we are witnessing – and have been since Lucy and Jose started the scene – is a continuous take that would have made Welles proud.
The camera follows Lucy while she stumbles over her dead paramour and onto the street. It tracks her while the ground level invasion is revealed. She avoids snipers and storm troopers in black riot gear, making her way through alleys and backyards as only a local might. There are a series of close calls until she gets cornered by some punks in a dilapidated basement apartment. There is no cut until the introduction of Dave Bautista’s character, Stupe, who comes to her rescue. It is the first of several long, continuous shots that make up the visual grammar of the film. They are all logistically impressive and the intensity of coordinating each one is palpable. The problem that arises is that these shots are this movie’s only neat trick. Other aspects like acting and screenwriting struggle toward mediocrity.
Bautista is listed as a producer and it’s easily apparent why he wanted to play this role: Stupe affords him the chance to show off his dramatic chops. Sadly, the drama is in the vein of a bad improv class. There are tears, heartbreaking confessions and a big reveal as to the nature of his character, but it’s all perfunctory; nothing is earned. The emotional moments exist as filler until the next extravaganza with a steadycam. There are two scenes toward the end that are meant to say something about heroism and the randomness of violence, but they are rendered meaningless by the preceding 80 minutes. They are met more with a shrug than shock.
Ironically, the charisma that makes Bautista a movie star helps propel Bushwick for the first 40 minutes or so before the holes get too big to fill. In another time this would have been a vehicle for an actor like Charles Bronson: the reluctant hero saving the day despite himself. And like those Bronson movies, it relies too much on its star to make it watchable. Bautista is a powerful, muscle-bound man, but some movies are just too heavy to carry.
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