The B-film “Assault on Wall Street” (2013), directed by Uwe
Boll, is as formulaic (in the sense of Screenwriting 101) in piling
difficulties onto the protagonist – here, I guess, anti-hero, a Wall Street security
guard Jim (Dominic Purcell) – as “it gets”. Sure, the film is “predictable” (a favorite
word of the late Roger Ebert). But it delivers a real political and moral punch
at the end.
Jim’s troubles start when his financial planner tells him
that most of his portfolio has evaporated into a scam, rather like Bernie
Madoff. Still, Jim is on the hook for
the principal. His lawyer won’t help him
because he doesn’t have the upfront cash (or credit score) to sue, even though
he would win in court.
His wife has aggressive cancer, and the employer health
insurance seems to have high deductibles and caps, so she is refused treatment.
In the movie’s “middle”, he finds his wedding ring with a note, before he finds
her dead in bed.
Then he loses his home (apparently in Queens, near the Mets
stadium) to foreclosure, moves to a rooming house and is on the verge of
homelessness.
But he has a lot of skills with weapons. If he is completely broke, I don’t know how
he pays for the arsenal he acquires to mount his accelerating rampage.
The last twenty minutes of the film clearly did not happen
in 2008 or any other time, because his rampage is more catastrophic than any
that have occurred in the US. And it is
progressive, with executives gunned down by his sniping on Manhattan streets
and through windows in midtown skyscrapers across the street. Finally, he confronts a hedge fund president,
and conducts a Machiavelli-like ideological debate with the man, holding him at
gunpoint, just before the cops finally arrive. The bank president justifies his
stature as the result of “survival of the fittest” and the strong ruling the
weak (fascism, rather than what he calls “capitalism”), despite the
indirect dependence of today’s rich on
the class and racial abuses of the past (like slavery). At the end, there is a
death penalty from the cops, even if by accident.
The official Facebook is here (Phase 4 films). The indoor (and some
neighborhood) scenes were filmed in Canada (around Toronto).
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