Occupy Wall Street is still alive and kicking to director Uwe Boll and actor Dominic Purcell. Even though the OWS movement didn’t even last for a full year, Boll had decided to make a film depicting an outsider violently attacking and murdering Wall Street Executives.
“Assault on Wall Street,” set to be released in limited theaters on May 10, 2013, depicts a man who decided to get his life back after the market crash by strapping on a mask, entering a bank with bombs and guns, and blowing the bank to smithereens while killing lots of people.
The minute and a half trailer depicted the bank attack followed by the phrase “Fight the Power.” It then continued to show the main character, played by Purcell, stake out a presumed to be executive’s house with a sniper rifle, followed by the phrase “Fight the Greed.”
More violent acts are shown, including a man being run down by a car, with the final caption of “Fight for Justice.” Clearly, the man committing murder and terrorism is the hero in this story … but since it’s against the supposedly evil Wall Street bankers, it’s completely appropriate.
In a HuffPo Live interview on April 8, Mike Sacks interviewed both Boll and Purcell. Sacks asked about the “revenge fantasy against Wall Street bankers” given the current climate in the gun debate. Uwe’s answer was simply, “It’s not a school shooting … or somebody who is mentally ill, like what happened in reality.”
What is reality is that this is another example of the entertainment industry’s love fest with violence, while simultaneously calling for stricter gun control. In a recent Culture and Media Institute study, the top five movies for the weekend of Jan. 11 included 65 scenes of violence, 38 of which were specifically gun violence, and depicted 185 individual victims.
There’s irony in the fact that the movie features over-the-top violence, something the media went out of their way to ignore during the actual OWS protests. Then, they called the OWS troublemakers “a tiny fringe” of the movement. In reality, as of Dec. 9, 2011, there were 417 recorded incidents of violence and crime in the Occupy movement nationwide.
“Assault on Wall Street” may not be that fictional, after all.
