Fresh off his positively scene-stealing turn in Marvel’s game-changer Guardians of the Galaxy, Dave Bautista returns to do a little more than just cracking skulls in Sundance hit Bushwick.
Running from a script by two genre greats, Stake Land’s Nick Damici and Until Dawn’s Graham Reznick, it’s pipped to be the former-wrestler’s first big star-making lead, and based on the early footage and promos, we can totally see why.
Bautista’s sensitive ex-military man Stupe partners with naive grad student Lucy (Pitch Perfect’s Brittany Snow) when their community-driven neighbourhood of Bushwick (itself just a tiny part of New York’s Brooklyn) comes under sudden attack from a military invasion. And we’re not talking more of the same cookie-cutter Russian/German/North Korean villainy either; this isn’t yet another Red Dawn remake situation. The invading forces here are American born – a composite army made up of Texas and all of its surrounding southern states, hell-bent on kickstarting a 21st-century civil war, with New York their first call to arms.
It’s a totally insane set-up, especially for a movie made independently, and on a shoestring budget no less. But after premiering at Utah’s world-famous Sundance Film Festival back in January, the buzz around this thoughtful little firecracker has been building fast, and with directors Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott’s debut hit Cooties a big hit at Sundance too, there’s no reason to believe that Bushwick will be anything less than a huge step-up. Because if they haven’t quite hooked you yet, just wait ’til you hear how the whole thing’s shot.
Borrowing a page from Birdman’s book, the directing duo rather madly chose to shoot the whole film as a string of increasingly long takes, making all of the action so that it take place entirely in real time. There’s a handful of cuts, and in order to make moving between different locations a bit more practical, there’s plenty of invisible editing too, stitching sequences shot separately together to make them flow as one. But otherwise, Bushwick looks to be all about maintaining a constant energy which, for an action film of this level, could be a huge boost.
Even without a giant Hollywood-style effects budget, Bushwick looks set to play fast and loose with some of the action world’s now fairly worn-out formulas, and we’re hugely excited to see the outcome. Plenty of (literal) non-stop action, and Dave Bautista’s already tried-and-tested, much deeper approach to movie violence, seems to be a totally killer combination, and with Murnion and Milott at the helm, there might even be a few laughs too. Not to mention a thumping score from none other than Aesop Rock.
By this point, do we even need to tell you to keep your eyes peeled when it drops into cinemas this August?
Ben Robins
