Review: Bushwick is a rush, but needs polishing

Low-budget Bushwick is about a modern-day southern insurgency – Texas, going full lone-star, sends soldiers swooping into a Brooklyn neighbourhood with weapons blazing as part of its plan to secede from the United States. Preposterous, of course. Ridiculous. Yeah.

Co-starring an unremarkable Brittany Snow as Lucy (a blue-eyed and blond grad student) and Dave Bautista as Stupe (a rugged but sensitive ex-soldier/medic), Bushwick is set in the chaos of a made-in-America urban battle. Characters struggle to figure out what in the world is happening as they attempt to reach havens that are never safe for long.

There's a shoot-'em-up video-game aesthetic and fury at work as we watch Stupe and Lucy from behind. Social commentary comes in the form of a pastor failing in the bedlam – religion is not the answer. Stupe enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps after losing his family on 9/11, but fighting in Iraq only made him feel worse – a metaphor.

Bushwick is an unpolished work, but there's an adrenalin charge, sure thing. It's close combat and it's closer than most Americans might wish to believe.