Bushwick (2017)

I watched a movie called Bushwick last night. Long story short: it was okay! It was ambitious and gets a lot of points for that, but the execution left something to be desired. For the slightly longer story, read on...


So in case you haven't heard of this movie (because I certainly hadn't when I saw it randomly on Netflix), this movie is about a group of people (well, two people, really - Brittany Snow from those Pitch Perfect movies and Dave Bautista from Guardians of the Galaxy and, uh... wrestling) trying to get out of Bushwick, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY, while some kind of hostile takeover seems to be going on. The movie throws you right into it, focusing on Brittany Snow and her boyfriend arriving in New York to meet her family and almost immediately throws them into chaos. It essentially plays out in real time with only like three or four traditional cuts, the rest of the scene changes are actually worked into the scenes so that the movie feels like a few long takes. This idea was cool in theory, but in practice... well, I'll get to that. My loyal readers (ha) know I like to work with the compliment sandwich model of critiquery, so first, let's talk about some good stuff.

The acting is actually pretty decent! Brittany Snow isn't bad - I've seen her in a few things (actually never seen any of the Pitch Perfect movies, but like... other stuff), but I have a feeling she's one of those actresses some people are going to automatically hate no matter what, so if that's you... yeah this one might be a pass. For everyone else though, she does a good enough job, considering the constraints you'd have to be under when you are making a movie of this nature. Dave Bautista actually does a pretty good acting job as well... Uh okay, I guess I'm onto the negatives now.

Well, one last positive: the movie is VERY ambitious. As I mentioned, the movie tries to play out like one long take and the cuts are supposed to be hidden in the scene, but the cuts are really... not good. A lot of the cuts happen on staircases so the camera spends a lot of time just focusing on stairs while people are running up them, and none of the transitions are smooth, like at all. I could see every one, and not in a snobby "hey, this isn't actually a long take, waaaah" kind of bitchy way, but in a really distracting, low budget kind of way. The first one I notice in the movie is probably the worst, focusing on the main character and her boyfriend running up some stairs, and... I don't know how to adequately explain how weird it looks! It's like the camera is moving fast and then slows way down and... I don't know. But nearly every transition in the movie is like this, focusing on the ground, or the sky, or the friggin' STAIRS and the camera speed and angles and everything suddenly changes and it feels like a different scene, but the movie is trying to tell you it's not, but it's lying to you and you know it and I know it and it hurts, you know? One of my favorite transitions takes place in the middle of a scene where a bunch of people are standing in a hallway and then a bomb goes off and the lights go out for a split second and suddenly one of the guys is pointing in a completely different direction from where he was a second before. So I guess I said ambition was one of the positives, but lol jk, I think this is a situation where someone in the making of this movie got TOO attached to the idea of it being a series of long takes, and the movie suffers for it. Someone had to have noticed this during the editing process, and someone should have stepped in and said "Okay guys, it was a good idea, but we just don't have the CG budget to smooth these transitions so let's just drop it and make it a normal movie" and then everybody could have breathed a sigh of relief because hey, maybe this movie will turn out good after all. But that never happened. I think if you are making art (I know, calling this movie art is a stretch, but bear with me), you need to go where the art takes you, not double down on a bad decision because you're dug in on the idea. In a movie like Cloverfield, where the whole thing was supposed to be "found footage" yes, you have to stick to the long takes because no one is editing it, but this movie didn't have that albatross around its neck, it wasn't found footage, someone just thought long takes looked cool, but didn't have the budget or the technical skill to pull it off.. I just think this completely unnecessary contrivance really brought the movie down and lead to one of the movie's other major problems, like the aforementioned dubbing issue.

So the dubbing. Most people sound fine in this movie, except for the fact that there are a lot (A LOT) of scenes where we see people from behind and I suspect the actors are either saying nothing or completely different things from what it sounds like they are saying. Dave Bautista is the exception to this rule. I don't know what happened, but it's like he spoke at some low bass level during the whole movie and I could barely understand a word out of his mouth without cranking the volume ALL the way up (not a great thing to do while watching a movie where things explode a LOT). Also, we RARELY see his face in this movie. It was ridiculous to a point where my mom, who I watched the movie with, theorized that they could only afford him for a few scenes so they just don't show his face often and have a stand in doing most of the movie in his place. I suspect maybe they edited out his face (like zoom way in on scenes so you just see torsos or walls or legs or whatever) because his mouth often doesn't match with what he's saying because they redubbed everything. One scene towards the end of the movie he gets a monologue and everything seems fine there, but throughout the rest of the movie it's like there is a disconnect between his mouth and what he's saying, to a distracting degree.

So, more compliments... uh, the main plot is kind of interesting and sort of original, and the movie feels like like an Escape From New York mashup with an alien invasion movie (but they aren't aliens). They do resolve what's going on (even though that thing that's going on is kind of dumb), so it's not one of those movies that brings up a bunch of questions and doesn't answer them.

Bottom line: This movie is okay. I don't regret watching it, and it's pretty short, close to 90 minutes, so it's not a huge time commitment. I'd say if you like action movies and have some time to kill, it's an interesting premise, even if the execution is lacking. I think it could have been a better movie if they tried to be a little less ambitious - but still not great.