Rent Assault on Wall Street (2013)

Assault on Wall Street review by George Hooper - Cinema Paradiso

Uwe Boll may be one of the more prolific directors working today but for those who know his work you might just be wishing he wasn’t. Assault on Wall Street is his latest exercise in action movie butchery and while the films plot and premise seems at least a little relevant it doesn’t help fix the predictable decline into mass destruction and poor plotting.

Assault on Wall Street follows Jim (Boll regular Dominic Purcell), a man who has lost everything thanks to the financial times and is desperately looking for someone to blame for everything that has transpired. When he finally picks a target he goes all out in his quest for his own kind of justice, a justice that looks an awful lot like vengeance.

Films like Wall Street may keep the occasional action film fans attention if only because it contains violence, explosions and gunfire. Those expecting something more will be disappointed as all Wall Street seems to do is re-enforce the concept of self pity and by extension, clinical insanity. The film makes you follow a man whose sole purpose is to destroy the bankers and profiteers that ruined his family life but he never once stops to contemplate his involvement or his responsibility.

The film pushes and prods audiences with a ‘bankers are evil’ stereotype so that you won’t hate this preposterous tale as Purcell does little to make Jim likable while he is rampaging through the city murdering countless people for his own sick amusement more than anything else. The film does try to redeem him in a way but by the end he is just a mass murderer and you, if you have a sense of morality, will hate him more than the capitalists that ‘forced’ his family apart. We might all hate bankers right now, and probably for the foreseeable future but at least make a film where we have good reason to