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2017, Recent Reviews, Reviews

Free Fire (2017)

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Imagine if you made a movie based on the last scene in Reservoir Dogs. Ben Wheatley (High-Rise) has done just that. Free Fire is about an illicit weapons deal gone wrong. A large cast of criminals featuring Sharlto Copley (District 9), Brie Larson (Room), and Armie Hammer (The Lone Ranger) is forced into an impromptu battle when two of their lower henchman let a personal, unrelated conflict escalate into violence. As the gunfight continues, loyalties are questioned and it’s unclear who (if anyone) is likely to escape.

You could call Free Fire a bottle film but Wheatley pulls variety out of the setting. The abandoned factory is littered with structural beams, remnants of machinery, and building materials that serve as impartial cover during the shootout. The area is rarely shown in its entirety which makes each person’s hiding spot unreliable. The audience, like the characters, doesn’t know how exposed everyone is and if someone might be creeping around a corner to get an angle on an outstretched leg. The action becomes WWI-style trench warfare and the constant danger makes what is essentially a movie where the cast spends most of the runtime laying on the ground a tense shootout.

Copley’s arms dealer cares about his outfit as much as the sale.

There is a nice mix of humor here. The action, while explicit, is played for slapstick laughs. Characters are often shot in the leg or grazed on the shoulder making their damage a painful annoyance rather than a devastating blow. Even seemingly deadly fire can still leave a character mobile and functioning. The cast also adds their efforts to the tone with Copley as the main comedic relief. He continues in his recent streak of overacted roles, but here it fits the character. His eccentric arms dealer with an exaggerated South African accent is a great take on the barely-competent criminal trope and contrasts nicely with Hammer playing the efficient straight man as his partner.

Wheatley has taken on a significant challenge: making a film in a restricted location with little to no upfront backstory its characters. In the end, we don’t know much about them beyond a broad archetype (drug addict, loyal protector, etc.), but the lack of exposition is a smart choice. Wheatley emphasizes their behavior in battle to reveal their true nature. It’s the way they line up a shot or how quick they are to protect someone on their side that tells volumes about them. This allows the audience to focus on the action without dragging down the pacing. At a taut 90 minutes, Free Fire is a breezy and bloody Mexican standoff with plenty of slapstick humor to boot.

4/5 stars.

2016, Recent Reviews, Reviews

The Hollars (2016)

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If film festivals can be epitomized, then The Hollars is Sundance in a nutshell. John Krasinski (The Office) directs and stars as John Hollar, a New York City office worker making a graphic novel in his spare time. He lives with his pregnant girlfriend Rebecca (Anna Kendrick; Pitch Perfect) until he finds out his mother Sally (Margo Martindale; Million Dollar Baby) has a brain tumor and needs surgery, requiring him to go back home for the first time in years. He returns to find that many things have changed and that his mother’s health isn’t the only problem his family faces.

Despite a talented cast, the performances are unrefined. Each actor is committed to their part and goes through the required motions, but the acting lacks precision. The cast needed more takes or a more demanding director to push them beyond their initial efforts. Particularly bad is the otherwise talented Sharlto Copley (District 9) as the divorced older brother who now lives with his parents. His acting is overly eccentric and his accent is distracting. Many foreign actors are able to imitate an American accent without notice, but Copley’s South African intonations are jarring when compared to his supposed family. The exception to this is the female cast. Martindale is captivating as the stern but caring matriarch. Her tough love is often hilarious and its clear why she is at the center of the family. Kendrick shines as well in her limited role. She manages to gently push John to move forward with his life without falling into the trap of becoming the whiny girlfriend character. Martindale’s and Kendrick’s acting is welcome, but it only puts their co-star’s shortcomings in further relief.

Martindale's sharp wit is incredibly endearing.
Martindale’s sharp wit is incredibly endearing.

The film checks off a list of tropes from festival darlings of the past 15 years. Almost every story beat or production choice can be guessed beforehand. The main character is stuck in a rut living in a big city, they feel like a stranger in their own hometown, and every character has been dusted in a healthy helping of quirk. Even the soundtrack follows the Sundance manual by only featuring tracks by indie folk singers. Movies like Garden State have already employed many of these features and Krasinski doesn’t attempt to grow beyond them.

There is an old saying that “you can’t go home again”, meaning that your memories of a place or time are static and will never match up to your new experiences if you try to revisit them. John’s trip home shows him how much his family’s situation has changed. The people he is close to have moved on with their lives, often to worse outcomes, while he was living in a vacuum, delaying change and avoiding risk. He hasn’t taken the next steps with his graphic novel or advanced his relationship with his longtime girlfriend because of his fear of failure. In many ways, this concept applies to the filmmakers themselves. Instead of attempting something original, they returned to a formula they knew. By strictly treading on common ground, The Hollars is an agreeable but forgettable comedic drama, barely distinguishable from its peers.

2/5 stars.

2016, Recent Reviews, Reviews

Hardcore Henry (2016)

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From B-movies in the 70’s to comic books in the present, blockbusters have always been influenced by the media their creators grew up with. Finally, enough time has passed that the generation that grew up playing video games is sitting behind the camera. Many films have played with flourishes that reference video game aesthetics (see any movie by Neil Blomkamp), but now we have the first film where the main inspiration in every feature, from craft to story, comes from interactive entertainment. Hardcore Henry, directed by Ilya Naishuller, is an action film shot entirely from the first person. Henry wakes up being literally put back together by his wife with no memory of his past. Before he can learn what has happened to him, they are attacked by a cartoonishly evil Kurt Cobain-esque villain who kidnaps Henry’s wife. The rest of the film is Henry trying to kill the bad guy and save his wife, aided by the help of a mysterious man (or men?) named Jimmy (Sharlto Copley; District 9).

And that is everything you need to know about the plot. Actually, it’s more of a setup than anything else. Taking a cue from many video games, Naishuller uses the barest of narratives because the film isn’t about the story, it’s about the spectacle. And that spectacle is fantastic. The first person perspective increases immersion and causes you to wince with each blow directed at the camera. It’s especially effective when Henry is getting thrown from planes, trains, and exploding automobiles. The stunts are always exhilarating even if they stretch believability. How does someone thrown off the roof of a moving van because it was blown up by a grenade fly through the air and land on the end of a motorcycle? Who cares. It looks cool.

Up close and personal.

This irreverent tone gives the film a winning playfulness except for the moments where it descends into juvenility. The film brands itself as “HARDCORE” and isn’t satisfied with just action in that regard. It has to be about hard guys doing hard guys things and it uses blatant misogyny to break up the adrenaline. Women in the film are relegated to being strippers, hyper-sexualized ninjas, or hollow plot devices sometimes literally used as props or background dressing. These instances aren’t frequent, but their casual nature is appalling. It’s a shame that the gleeful violence is tarnished by these adolescent male tendencies when the stunts are exceptional and deserve to be seen in theaters.

Many of the set pieces could be called direct adaptations of video games or video game trailers. The opening credits are played over a gruesome montage of slow motion kills bathed in red lighting that clearly imitates the initial Killzone 3 teaser. Later scenes pull from famous levels found in popular first person shooters. The sniper scene from the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is recreated here from the abandoned concrete building right down to the ghillie suit. The stunts only falter when rather than introduce a new set piece, the film just throws in more enemy henchmen (which ironically is a common complaint in video games). Even though these stunts are not always novel, the translation to a new medium creates a fresh, frenetic energy and the film happily revels in that chaos.

4/5 stars.