This is the final film in Michel Jetté's trilogy on organized crime. The first one, Hochelaga, was a gritty and uncompromising portrait of Montreal's infamous world of biker gangs telling the story of a young man trying to make his way to the upper echelons. The second one, Histoire de pen, depicted the impact of imprisonment on a young man's tortured soul through both surreal and ultra-realistic, in-your-face moments.
Bumrush, however, kind of takes a step back, and tries to be a different animal here. And it loses itself at that. It's kind of a cross between your typical modern-day action film, and a depiction of Montreal's street gangs that almost takes the path of a documentary, showcasing overly vile behaviours and disturbing characters.
Bumrush's problems are not in its breed of genres, anyways. What it has in ambition, it lacks both in execution and fundamentals.
The cast is talented, but the characters are totally uninteresting. They are underdeveloped; the dialogue is phony and sounds completely unnatural; and every character is a cliché. It's a shame, because they've got some seriously good actors in this. I did like the use of non-professionals as street gang members, though, they did a decent job.
Another major flaw is the editing, which considerably hurts the narrative line of the film. It tries hard on style, with typical flashy effects and transitions, but it never is efficient. The continuity is lacking, a bit like in The Punisher and The Expendables. Every scene is like a closed, homogeneous environment, lacking any narrative connection to the next or previous one. The tension never escalates because of this, and the film as a whole seems like a bunch of individual sequences clumsily put together. The aerial shot of Montreal felt like it was used two hundred times. It's really used as a queue to tell the viewer ''you're jumping to the next scene, pal''. And it's always the SAME shot. By the end of the film, it becomes pretty embarrassing.
The dialogue between the main characters is way too polished to be anyhow believable (considering the underworld they're trying to portray), and it's often used to give the viewer an update on what's going on in with story. Maybe they lacked budget or something, because some entire key scenes are just explained by a character instead of being actually shown. These never-ending, abysmal explanations bring this film to an almost amateur level at times, and while it does try to hold all the pieces together and roughly patches the obvious budget holes, it prevents the film from having any kind of an interesting pace whatsoever.
Bumrush might have fallen victim of its low budget, but at its core, it's got even bigger problems than that. I thought this would be Quebec's first REAL badass film. In that department, it's like that kid in gym class who tries real hard, but never succeeds. For me, it's a big disappointment, since I really enjoyed Michel Jetté's previous work.
The initial idea behind Bumrush did have a ton of potential, I don't doubt it a single second. The final product, however, is unsatisfying and feels unfinished.
