Netflix And Chill: Bushwick (2017)

I've seen a lot of love in recent months for Bushwick, a film that throws together two characters (played by Brittany Snow and Dave Bautista) and shows part of America heading to civil war hell in a handbasket around them. Co-written by Nick Damici and Graham Reznick (the former having been a vital component in the filmography of Jim Mickle over the past dozen years), it's an interesting "what if?" scenario.

Snow plays Lucy, a young woman who starts the movie about to get on a train with her boyfriend. Moments, and at least one explosion, later, her boyfriend is dead and Lucy has to find shelter while wondering just what is going on. Circumstances lead her into the home of a war veteran named Stupe (Bautista) and that's when the two begin to get a clearer picture, as hard as it may be to believe. It seems that a small military force has decided to help a number of states secede from the rest of the USA, and that will be a turbulent, painful, process.

Directed by Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott, Bushwick may be far removed from their previous work (Cooties) in content but it's similarly problematic when it comes to the execution of the script. This is a film that wants to be serious and sombre throughout most of the runtime, yet it very quickly piles on one wildly implausible moment after another. I'm not going to pretend to know how things would pan out if a new civil wore ever broke out in America but even I would be surprised if it led to such quick and sudden complete anarchy, and individuals so devastated by the fighting around them that they would rather commit suicide.

Snow and Bautista are both excellent in their main roles, believable as, respectively, the naive youngster quickly out of her depth and the professional ex-soldier who knows how is prepared for the worst and keeps clear aims in mind. It's easy to imagine Mickle in Bautista's role, and I wonder whether he deliberately decided to just stick to the writing this time around or whether Bautista's name helped in terms of funding and ensuring that the film was made. Angelic Zambrana and Jeremie Harris are two of the main supporting players, and do just fine, with many other faces just appearing for one or two scenes in between skirmishes.

Bushwick is not a bad film. It's just a film that doesn't ever seem to be sure of how it wants to put things across. If you want something based in a grim reality then it has moments of that, yet it also has far too moments of nonsense that feels like they've been pulled from a book entitled "101 Classic Doomsday Scenario Moments". And the ending doesn't help. It just feels like a sucker punch, and undermines a lot of what came before it.

6/10

You can buy the disc here.
Americans can buy it here.