The Daily Wire Is Quietly Shooting a Pro-ICE Movie. We Got the Script.
The Bulwark · C · trust 48/100
Locals aren’t happy about the film’s take on the ICE shooting of Renée Good.
Will Sommer October 1 Upgrade to listen 10 minutes 575 146 75 (Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/ The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock) BEN SHAPIRO AND THE DAILY WIRE are desperate to crack Hollywood. But Shapiro’s most recent foray into film, the anti-Muslim Run Hide Fight: Infidels , was hardly The Odyssey . Sitting at a meager 20 percent among reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes, the movie has inspired Shapiro’s fans to say things like “What’s going on with this movie?!” and “This movie was trash.”
The far-from-rapturous reception hasn’t stopped Shapiro and his Run Hide Fight: Infidels collaborator, conservative film producer Dallas Sonnier , from firing up the cameras once again. Since late September, the Daily Wire has quietly been shooting a pro-ICE action film in Montana that dramatizes the raids and protests around last winter’s Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis—including the fatal shooting of protester Renée Good.
I got my hands on a draft of the script, and I’ll say this: I don’t think this movie will be any more of a hit than Shapiro’s last effort.
I suppose we should say: Spoilers ahead. But you’re not gonna watch this anyways. So take a second to join Bulwark+ instead.
The film, with the working title Pawn Shop , centers on an Antifa siege of a Minneapolis pawn shop amid anti-ICE unrest. On one side: an ICE agent joined by a group of pawn-shop employees and customers. On the other: a rabble of progressive protesters, and eventually a bloodthirsty MS-13 death squad, both intent on rescuing a Hispanic man detained by ICE. It plays out exactly how you’d expect it would.
The film’s first minutes will likely get the most attention. As Pawn Shop opens, two ICE agents in Minneapolis arrest the Latino man, later revealed to be an MS-13 boss. Dimwitted liberal activists film and scuffle with the agents as they try to take their suspect away.
Then the film’s Renée Good stand-in enters, slamming her Subaru into the ICE van. Described with the subtlety of a brick as “MELANIE (40), a fat blue-hair,” the woman, blasting NPR, revs up again and fatally hits ICE agent “Juan” with her car. Then his ICE partner, “Mike,” shoots her in a justifiable killing.
Melanie reacts to the drawn gun with panic...
She MASHES on the gas as she throws the car into reverse, accidentally SLAMMING Juan out of the way. He goes flying into the gutter, bleeding...
And as the car reverses, Mike FIRES TWICE through the
The first shot takes the [ sic ] Melanie in the neck, below her covid
mask. The second in the head, above her covid mask.
Blood SPLATTERS on her PASSENGER’s (40s, female, overweight)
From there, the ICE agent drags his suspect into the pawn shop, with an Antifa mob hot on their heels. The stage is now set for a siege, during which numerous Molotov cocktails will be thrown and shotgun shells will fly. Rest assured that no liberal piety will survive.
Inside the pawn shop, we meet its grizzled Hispanic owner and his son, newly back from college and majoring in Chicano studies. Much to his father’s chagrin, the son is dressed in a Che Guevara shirt and “listening to a POP SONG unfitting for a man.” A pawn-shop security guard quips they’re lucky the boy didn’t get a sex change.
On location: The pawn shop in Pawn Shop . In case this instance of conservative humor didn’t give it away, there are plenty of other signs that this is a Daily Wire production. An overweight liberal in a mobility scooter “BELLOWS as only one with morbid obesity can.” Posing as an innocent laborer, the MS-13 member begs other characters to protect him.
A Korean grocery store adjoining the pawn shop introduces the idea, beloved by very-online conservatives, of a “ rooftop Korean ” that will figure prominently in the film. In an apparent nod to Shapiro’s ongoing struggles with more bigoted elements on the right, a treacherous heroin addict trapped in the shop is also a racist who calls a more enlightened conservative character a “cuck.”
Pawn Shop ’s plot mirrors that of Run Hide Fight: Infidels . In the latter, a disparate group of college students and employees end up tossed together to fight Muslim terrorists taking over a college campus, with a woke mayor preventing actual law enforcement from intervening until our heroes resolve the standoff—call it The Taking of Fordham One Two Three . Here, anti-ICE riots prevent Minneapolis police or other ICE agents from defeating Antifa and MS-13 and saving our thrown-together characters until the climactic shootout.
Filming hasn’t gone totally quietly in Livingston, Montana, the small town where Pawn Shop is being shot. Locals got their hands on the script, too, and started honking their car horns and attempting other small-scale disruptions to the shoot.
“We want them to know: Don’t come do this shit in our town,” one protester, who asked not to be named for fear of online retaliation, told me.
An admirable effort, but I think Shapiro’s film is sufficiently self-sabotaging on its own. If the script is anything to go by, I doubt many people will be watching this one, either.
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