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| Directed by Ilya Naishuller Written by Ilya Naishuller and Will Stewart |
Alo Party Peoples.
You wake up in a mysterious laboratory with a woman that says she's your wife. As she screws on your cybernetic limbs, she tells you that your name is Henry, and that you're a prototype super-soldier that she's stolen from Akan, a Russian mad scientist bent on taking over the world; before she can install your speech module, said mad scientist breaks into her lab with his telekinetic superpowers and you grab your wife to jump into an escape pod and crash over Moscow. When you land, Akan's hired goons kidnap your wife, but you run for it, and you run into a man that looks at lot like Sharlto Copley. He says his name is Jimmy and he's here to help, he gives you a gun and directions to Akan's fortress so you can rescue your wife and take revenge. And you do...
As the first generation of filmmakers to grow up with video games as a constant presence in their lives since early childhood comes of age, visual language from games bleeding into cinema is becoming more and more common. Using popups to depict text messages instead of holding on an awkward static shot of a cellphone? That's an innovative solution to a relatively new problem. Using long elaborate tracking shots to make a heavily scripted action scene look more impressive? That gets annoying if you've seen it enough times, but it's an impressive translation of the cut-scene to a non-interactive medium. And eventually -- inevitably -- as the generation of gamers that grew up on Xbox Live starts entering film school, someone shot an entire film in first-person.
And if you just audibly groaned at the mere idea of a first-person shooter movie, I get where you're coming from; I'm not a fan of shaky-cam to begin with, and I've never been much of a gamer, so the prospect of "It's a Call of Duty death match, but you don't get to play it." was never going to do much for me, it sounded like a gimmick to save time on cinematography. "Where do we put the camera!? Put it on that guy's head!" but I have to admit that Hardcore Henry kind of rules. First-time director Ilya Naishuller has perfectly captured the mindset of a Twitch-addicted teenager who was given millions of dollars and a GoPro and told "Go nuts!". The plot is about what you'd expect from that, but the storylines of most first-person shooters - especially the ones that Hardcore Henry is directly influence by - are already trying to imitate a blockbuster action movies to some extent, so embracing that inspiration by taking a stock action script and shooting it in first person is just short of inspired...
...but it still falls short of inspired. Being able to shoot an entire film in first-person is impressive, but so was making a film look like it was all done in one shot, and so was painstakingly recreating silent film making; technical style is all fine and good, but it works better when you have something to say using it, and Hardcore Henry doesn't have much substance to back up the spectacle. It feels like a demo for the idea of a first-person action film, it's a promising technique, but this is unlikely to be the best use of it. It leans too heavily on shaky-cam and it's limited perspective as a crutch to hide lackluster choreography and middling effects work, and the novelty of that perspective does get old after a while, and the film tries to make up for that by being of the nastiest, bloodiest action movies to hit mainstream theaters in a long time. It's a full-on gore fest that makes Kingsman look like it belongs at the kids table. But there's a certain enthusiastic flippant, adolescent screaming charm to it that makes it work in the moment.
...but it still falls short of inspired. Being able to shoot an entire film in first-person is impressive, but so was making a film look like it was all done in one shot, and so was painstakingly recreating silent film making; technical style is all fine and good, but it works better when you have something to say using it, and Hardcore Henry doesn't have much substance to back up the spectacle. It feels like a demo for the idea of a first-person action film, it's a promising technique, but this is unlikely to be the best use of it. It leans too heavily on shaky-cam and it's limited perspective as a crutch to hide lackluster choreography and middling effects work, and the novelty of that perspective does get old after a while, and the film tries to make up for that by being of the nastiest, bloodiest action movies to hit mainstream theaters in a long time. It's a full-on gore fest that makes Kingsman look like it belongs at the kids table. But there's a certain enthusiastic flippant, adolescent screaming charm to it that makes it work in the moment.
Hardcore Henry is the best example of me really appreciating something I theoretically should have hated in a long time, it's an exceptionally well done version of exactly what it wants to be... which is an angry teenager movie, granted - but it's a damn good angry teenager movie, and like the similarly adolescent-minded Deadpool, it's one that's self-aware enough to deliver gleefully flippant catharsis instead of sulking in it's own self-satisfied seriousness like Dawn of Justice. I don't know whether the director has a vision, or anything to say, or even if he has a second film in him, but his brief burst into boorish brilliance is a badly needed breath of fresh air, destined to become a sleeper-hit cult-classic.
Have a nice day,
Greg.B
FINAL RATING: 4/5
Have a nice day,
Greg.B
FINAL RATING: 4/5
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