Ever get the feeling that the movie you’re watching is sentient, ill-tempered, and perfectly happy to kick your legs out from underneath you at the worst possible moment for maximum cruelty? That’s “Bushwick,” a slick, swaggering gallimaufry of alt-history war-cum-propaganda movie a’la “Red Dawn,” oriented on a sudden and violent invasion of New York (yes, that Bushwick) by unknown, ad libbed, but altogether well-organized military force. The film demands much of its audience but rather than pay off the emotional toll it takes on us, it viciously punches us right in the gut instead. It’s a mean, mean movie, and its meanness epitomizes its utter pointlessness as both entertainment and commentary.
The silver lining is that divorced of that meanness, the commentary in “Bushwick” isn’t particularly well-developed, and it isn’t especially entertaining, so at least directors Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion avoid the cardinal sin of wasting potential. If anything, the film is ballsy, maybe even daring, as an ambitious attempt at siphoning the real-world sociopolitical divide in American culture circa 2017; Milott and Murnion have chosen New York City as their setting, and the start of a new Civil War as their conflict, with alternately bewildered and furious New Yorkers snared in its midst. It’s the rallying cry of “the South will rise again” wrought celluloid. If only the naked provocation of the material actually amounted to anything more than that.
In fairness, Milott and Murnion hit the ground running as “Bushwick” commences, letting their viewers know right away that they mean business: The camera tracks, and continues to track, an attractive young woman, Lucy (Brittany Snow), as she steps off a train with her boyfriend and walks along wondering aloud where everyone is as it’s made increasingly obvious the station is a ghost town. There are no edits, no cuts, to interrupt her inquiries, which go unanswered right up until a flaming man runs into the station and alerts her for good that something’s wrong. She ducks her head outside and is greeted with chaos personified by explosions and gunfire, and from there tries her best just to survive in the war zone that’s fallen right in her backyard.
Lucy isn’t alone, though. She’s joined by Stupe (David Bautista), a former army medic serving in his post-military life as a janitor; more accurately, Stupe is joined by Lucy, whom he rescues from a pair of would-be rapists before setting out to find a train to Hoboken, where his wife and child live. With Lucy as his unexpected baggage, “Bushwick” morphs into a run-and-gun style of movie where the duo hauls ass from one location to the next, dodging bullets and gawping at the destruction around them in pure horror. (Again, for accuracy: Lucy gawps. Stupe just grimaces.) Along the way, they meet fellow denizens of the Big Apple and observe the ways humans mutate when placed in extreme situations. (For the most part, they turn into violent looters. Remember: The commentary here isn’t very well-developed. Being as most of the other characters in the film belong either to roving street mobs or violent gangs, and being as they’re mostly minorities, that commentary is also, well, kinda troubling.)
What keeps “Bushwick” interesting is its technique. Like a distilled version of “Birdman,” the movie looks and feels as if it’s strung along on a handful of nigh-endless takes; this approach is established in the train station as the story begins, and continues on from there as Stupe does his best to keep Lucy from getting her head blown off. The idea is to draw the audience into each scene of mayhem as soldiers fighting for the cause of newfound secession murder civilians, and as the familiar world of New York, so often documented by both fiction and nonfiction cinema alike, is set to ruin before our very eyes. Credit to Milott and Murnion: The ploy works. But like injudicious amateur comedians who don’t know when to stop a joke before they kill it, they don’t know when to apply the technique and when not to. The film never holds still after drawing us in, and by consequence it dumps us out. Asking viewers to stay focused for an hour and a half when you can’t help showing off behind the lens is a big ask.
But maybe not as big an ask as the premise. “Bushwick” puts us in uncomfortable territory right from the start, leaving us in the dark about the reason for the madness; once the reason is given to us, we start to squirm in our seats. It is neither Milott nor Murnion’s fault that “Bushwick” is premiering in theaters just a couple of weeks after the awful events of Charlottesville, and it isn’t their fault that we live in a time when the rift that separates swaths of America from one another is equally as defined by politics as by topography. All the same, “Bushwick” puts a meaningfully blunt point on the chasm between Americans in the North and the South, and somehow, even as the film establishes a clear moral distinction between invading Southern militias and defending Northerners, the results feel icky at best and overwhelmingly grim at worst.
Maybe if the film gave us the relief of a satisfying ending, the grimness, the ickiness, wouldn’t be so pronounced. But it doesn’t. Put it this way: If Trey Edward Shults’ outstanding sophomore feature “It Comes at Night” shook you too far to your core, then “Bushwick” is poorly suited for your palate. [C-]
