A young man with a troubled past expresses himself through street art in this independent drama. Anthony (Mark Webber) is a 19-year-old kid living in New York City who was introduced to "bombing" -- graffiti art sprayed on public walls when the cops aren't looking -- by his older brother. When his brother died, Anthony took up bombing himself, and with the help of his pals Justin (Gano Grills) and Kevin (Jade Yorker) he does murals under the street name "Blest," while struggling to avoid the
NYPD's anti-graffiti Vandal Squad. Anthony's mother (Donna Mitchell) is after him to quit bombing and attend art school, while his girlfriend (Jaclyn DeSantis) wants to get out of New York, and would like him to join her. However, it takes a run-in with Bobby Cox (Al Sapienza), a Vandal Squad cop with a hair-trigger temper, to push Anthony into making a decision about his life. Bomb the System was the first feature film from writer and director Adam Bhala Lough, who was only 23 years old when the picture was made. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
Lough's impressive, if uneven, debut feature captures the adrenaline rush and contradictory nature of the simultaneously creative and criminal activity but stumbles in its attempt to justify it as an art form.
Thoroughly fails to convince that its handful of New York characters known as 'bombers,' graffiti mongers futilely yearning for immortality via nightly despoiling of public and private property, is of any tragic interest.
A didactic ode to a lifestyle that makes little sense, no matter the darkly romantic rebel-with-a-cause ideas associated with what is essentially an act of vandalism.
A flashy but numbingly hollow compendium of Trainspotting-inspired visual gimmicks, Lough's tale of New York City 'bombers' is formulaic in the extreme.
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