Film Review: FREE FIRE (2016)

 

Director Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire (2016) is in the same vein as his Kill List (2011) or Down Terrace (2009) so if you enjoy those films you might enjoy this film which takes a bunch of criminals and throw them in a warehouse for the deal of the century only everything goes completely wrong and its criminal against criminal in a blood bath or carnage and mayhem.

The film has an amazing cast that includes Brie Larson, Sharlto Copley, Armie Hammer, and Cillian Murphy to name but a few of this huge cast.  With a screenplay written by Amy Jump and Wheatley the film is filled with some amazing dialogue which gives the actors some amazing moments of comedy despite the ludicrous set up of the story.  If you have seen some of Wheatley’s previous films, he’s all about characters that have particular issues who are put in unusual circumstances that can be both funny and brutal.

Free Fire is a very brutal film but it is done in such cartoon violence that you can’t help to be taken for the ride.  Now this is a film that may not take itself too seriously and neither should you as all the fun is in entering the film with an open mind and just going along for the ride.  If you can do that then you will enjoy this film.  If not…well, I guess we should just put you in front of the firing squad now.

Film Review: HARDCORE HENRY (2015)

If you are a fan of first person shooter games, you are the only ones who will enjoy the film Hardcore Henry (2015).  Everyone else stay clear away.  There’s not much of a plot in this film other than Henry (Andrei Dementiev) wakes up to find himself with a fractured memory and a new cybernetic body that allows him to defy human feats.  He knows that he must save Estelle (Haley Bennett) but everything else he must learn on his own as he must escape capture and being killed by a bunch of thugs who want to kill him.  The gimmick of the film is that it is entirely in the first person which means “you” are Henry as he goes on his destruction of the city to save Estelle by any means necessary.  Along the way he gets help from Jimmy (Sharlto Copley) and his many endless supply of clones who seem to die every five to ten minutes. 

The film is a chase sequence followed by Henry killing a bunch of thugs before escaping and repeating the whole thing over again every ten minutes.  For the first ten minutes it was interesting as the production values and the CGI were phenomenal but after about twenty minutes the whole process got repetitive and boring.  What’s worse is that all the acting is bad except for maybe Copley who is the only one having any fun (I presume because he gets to play a hundred different versions of himself that all get killed).  Another travesty of the film is that writer/director Ilya Naishuller has no problems with taking liberties with the editing style whenever he chooses in a film that should be from the main character’s perspective the whole time but isn’t since he edits & cuts out footage constantly.

The last film I almost walked out on at the theater was The Pyramid (2014), which also took too many liberties with the style and editing, and this was another film which doesn’t deserve your attention since if the filmmakers don’t seem to really care neither should you.