Assault on Wall Street (2013)

Crappy film

Absolutely the worst movie.

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

This is a great film. It not only has well directed action and an excellent story; but it does more to explain why one out of four Americans do not have 400 dollars to spare in case of an emergency than any film I have seen in recent years. Seriously. Even better than The Big Short. I kid you not.I wish this came out in theaters. The film is about a middle-class man and his wife who slowly lose all their income thanks to cancer and greedy Wall Street fat cats. The perfection about this film is how it builds and builds. You see the couple trying to cope while you learn more and more about the one-sided U.S. banking system. Another thing I like about this film is how it teaches us that lawyers work side-by-side and even encourage this corrupt system. If you've ever watch a film that has anything to do with law in it, you may have noticed that for every "bad guy" lawyer there is always a "good guy" lawyer. This is literally the only film I have ever seen that shows what your average bloodsucking lawyer does to the working man. Such a brilliant and powerful scene. Now let us talk about the action. This is far from a mindless action film. The gunplay builds into the film during the second half but isn't overwhelming or cheesy. As good as the action may be, you'll remember this film for the whole film and not just the action. This is a must watch.

In 2009, Uwe Boll gave us Rampage, a rage-fuelled exercise in violence that I viewed as a form of catharsis for the director. I guess Boll had a lot more anger in him than I originally thought, because Assault on Wall Street sees the film-maker once again venting his spleen via his art, the target this time being the greedy bankers of Wall Street and capitalism in general.Dominic Purcell plays hard-working security guard Jim Baxford, who must be one of the unluckiest characters in the history of film: his wife is receiving expensive treatment for a brain tumour, his insurance policy refuses to cover the cost, his savings turn out to be worthless thanks to some irresponsible trading by his brokers, he loses his job, his wife—consumed by guilt—commits suicide, and then he's evicted from his home. With nothing else to lose but his own miserable life, he decides to make the greedy bankers on Wall Street pay for their mistake—in blood!There's no denying that Boll lays it on with a trowel—there's zero subtlety in his script—but in the end, Assault On Wall Street is a satisfyingly bloody slice of violent revenge cinema, one that also carries an important message at its heart: there is a shocking disparity between the haves and the have nots, and it is only getting worse. If the situation doesn't change, bloodshed is inevitable.7.5 out of 10, rounded up to 8 for IMDb.

The reviews that call this the best have to be from people with an emotional short circuit in their make up or a stake in this movie. The acting, the story and the pacing are all so predictable as to be outrageously insulting. The overwhelming pile up of the bad things that happen to the lead character could have led to a great cathartic ending if there were a point to any of it. When I watch an action/revenge movie such as this I enter into an unspoken agreement with the director and writer that is something like "you keep me reasonably hypnotized and in the moment of your story and I'll suspend belief and turn off the judging part of my brain". The acting, writing and directing are so bad that I never got to turn the judge-ey part of my brain off. "Bad stuff happened" is in no way a justification for the unbridled and completely amoral killing of total innocents. This movie has no moral center. It's just disgraceful. The blood thirsty climactic violence should be focused tightly on executing (pun intended) said death, mayhem, and cataclysm on the BAD GUYS, not on an office full of men and women that are just doing their 9 to 5 thing. I am in no way an apologist for the scum sucking leeches that came out of the financial crisis with their fortunes not only fully intact, but much larger than before by a few orders of magnitude, all at the expense of the rest of us. However, the fact that there are people out there that think this movie shows a righteous everyman giving it to the man - instead of an unhinged, murderous, slug with no conscience wreaking senseless havoc - scares me. He has clearly gone mad. No, I take that back. There is no attempt to show him "snapping" and losing it. He is shown as an intensely mean and calculating monster. No amount of "YEAH! GIVE IT TO 'EM!!" blood lust excuses what he's done. He needs to be put down, not signed up for a sequel.Again, no moral center, no redeeming value.

Full of spoilers. You've been warned. The movie starts off with the most unluckiest man in the world. He's a security guard and not a cop, his wife has cancer that the insurance company won't cover, all of his money is in a stock, that goes belly up, and on top of that he's being taken for more money because of a bad stock. He gets a lawyer, who screws him over. During all of this, this huge muscular man is completely calm and barely gives more than a boo-whoo, aw shucks vibe. Never gets angry. Until the ADA blows him off, and he curses at his secretary, but barely. It's supposed to be this profound moment, and it just falls so flat, and so weak. Then his wife kills herself. She cleans the house nice, does all his laundry, and then crawls into bed and fills it with blood. We finally get a little emotion out of our main character. It takes about 70 of the 98 minutes to get into any sort of action, when he accidentally kills the ADA. Then he goes on his spree, magically not being seen by cameras, or people, despite the fact he's using a very loud hi powered rifle in a sweet little Great Neck, Long Island. The climax of the movie starts with him picking people off from a parking garage, and then when he runs out of bullets, he walks out onto a horrifed street. People--who should have ran away but are for some reason just hanging out in perfect shooting range--are crying at the site of the masacre, while this man who walks out of where the gun shots were coming from, looking very angry and disinterested, and holding a freaking mask in his hand, just walks across the street without anyone noticing. If this movie ended with him being a ghost that killed people, that would be more believable. The line at the end of the movie "you know the difference between a banka and a gangsta?".....this guy wasn't a gangster! He was ex-military, he was a security guard, he was taking care of his family.....what's gangster about his character until he has a nervous breakdown at the end? And even then, he's not a gangster......he's apparently a murdering mastermind. Maybe if he'd chosen a profession of heists and murdering people, he wouldn't be in the financial woes that he was in. I watched this movie because I saw that Eric Roberts, Keith David, Edward Furlong, and John Heard were in it, so I figured it wouldn't be AWFUL. The story was bad, boring, drawn out, and ham-fisted. The writing was boring, and so full of agenda that it loses its emotional hold completely. The acting was flat--all around. Eric Roberts is this high powered lawyer that could just as easily be a hippie on W4th. I don't lightly give this a 1 star review. This moving is insultingly bad, and should honestly be ashamed of itself. It's not so bad it's good. It's not redeemable at all.