
Uwe Boll is disappointingly pleasant. His name strikes fear into the hearts of movie fans (and those who’ve watched Blackwoods at 2 a.m.), but when you’re in the same room as the most infamous of infamous directors, talking to him about his new film Assault on Wall Street, the most offensive thing about him is his German accent, and that’s only because all German accents are terrifying.
Where to begin with Boll? Do you start with him often being next to Ed Wood in the list of the worst directors of all-time, except unlike Wood, he doesn’t have a great Tim Burton movie to polish his legacy (yet…?)? Or maybe his string of awful to there-is-no-God-awful video game adaptations, including In the Name of the King (4% on Rotten Tomatoes), BloodRayne (4%), and naturally, BloodRayne 2: Deliverance (unrated; direct to DVD)? Or possibly his suing a film festival for $170 (and Billy Zane for $170,000), or his blogger boxing matches, or Blubberella, or Auschwitz, or the time he called Michael Bay and Eli Roth “f*cking retards”? OK, that last one was pretty great, but otherwise, it’s been a whole lotta nothing from the man whose middle finger picture will be on his tombstone.
So I regret to inform you that Assault isn’t terrible. Unlike most of Boll’s work, it’s meant to inspire. Inspire those who’ve been f*cked over by bankers to get violent revenge, but inspire nonetheless. Assault stars Dominic Purcell (Prison Break) as a blue-collar security guard with an extremely ill wife (Erin Karpluk) whose life is upended when…you get where this is going…and then there’s an absolute bloodbath. The film isn’t subtle in the least and spends too much time drowning in its nihilistic misery, but its anger is genuine; it never feels like Boll’s taking advantage of something terrible for his own personal gain (unlike his previous work). He’s genuinely pissed at what happened and all too happy to talk about it, as he did during our 10-minute interview in New York last month.





