film review

Just a simple honest review of a movie I caught a buzz off recently, not to everyone's tastes im sure but im still experimenting with style atm

Hardcore Henry - was that a film I just saw or the fulfilment of an ambition shared by some game and cinema literate nerds the place over in times gone by when cameras on phones was the latest thing after the rise of The 3310? You could hold the camera to your face, pick up anything resembling a firearm and shoot, quite quite literally. Even if you consider yourself apart from the level of nerdship I’m talking this film taps into a longing of mine maybe shared by you. The longing of minds to interact with the reality of physical perspective and objects in a completely subjective first person adventuresque fashion using naught but fresh young ingenuity of thought and imagination. You are included in this if you let out a childish grin of beaming nostalgia like I did when in Inside Out you saw Riley’s memory of her playing “Don’t tread on the Lava.” If you get this you’ll get what I mean. Most of us have done this or something similar. Some still do. Escapism and folly or useful exercise of the creative fuctioning imagination though? Either way HH taps into this.

Hardcore Henry is not conventionally a “good” film. It was certainly much better than I thought it would be and also about as “bad” as I hoped it would be. It lacks refinement but makes up for it with cutting edge precision in choreography of camera technique and whilst several mates have brought up the quality of the acting or lack thereof not without fair reason I’ll arrive at this later. 

It is the debut of Ilya Naishuller so there’s really nothing I can say with precision about his credentials as a filmmaker beyond this movie. Buuuut it is produced by the director of the wildly successful (for a Russian film) Nightwatch series, Wanted and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer one Timur Bekmambetov and you can see the influence on Hardcore Henry from these films right from the excrutiatingly gory opening titles. 

Hardcore Henry is about a man brought to life again through the transformative power of technology into a cyborg. His memory is lost and the “objective” of the film is for him to recover it and his wife from abduction. His antagonist is a super powered albino intent on world conquest using the scientific means that recreated Henry to bio-engineer a personal army cut from Henry’s cloth.

The primary gimmick of the movie and it’s arch selling power is that it is shot from a first person perspective. Now we’ve seen this before. Cloverfield. Even Blair Witch Project beat these guys to it. So the second gimmick is that this film looks, sounds and feels like a video game. And if it looks sounds and feels like something it usually is that something. This is why I asked if this was a film. It is a game in so many things except the only true player was Ilya Naishuller.

Anyway. If this was a game what game was it most akin to. I pulled three out of the hat. Mirror’s Edge, MGS 2 and Bionic Commando. Mirror’s Edge was famous for two things imo. First person adventure where the action wasn’t solely about gunning enemies down aaaaand free running. Lots of that. And there’s lots of it in Hardcore Henry too. Which is where the highlight of precision in filmic and physical choreography comes in. Also HH isn’t just about shooting bad guys despite what the admittedly fun trailer set to Queen’s Dont Stop Me Now lures you with. This makes it less like Call of Duty spin off and closer to MGS.

The setting of Hardcore Henry is contemporary Russia with a heavy neo-futurist tinge. Metal Gear Solid 2 is also sort of contemporary and definitely not not heavy on its futuristicness. But there’s more to it than that. The plot twists like a snake and the themes of memory loss, transhumanism, neo-warfare and reformed (or reforming) conceptions of solid masculinity are all so appropriately fit for a game it screams them like a game with the electric energy of an eel.

Now I never played Bionic Commando and without looking can’t really recall much of what it’s about. I use it here as an example of a typical game with a similar protagonist. Apologies to any lovers coz I ent hatin but you can probably expect clunky dialogue, trite storytelling and sloppy characterisation. I’m not talking about HH here mind you. The dialogue is snappy like the editing in the film, witty here and there. The characters are all so over the top it doesn’t even matter and the story doesn’t matter either. Henry rips along. Yet calm life gathering moments are flung in smartly so we the audience aren’t totally gutted hung drawn and quartered by the relentless velocity of the pace of the action sequences. Thrilling isn’t the word. Exhausting is. There is even at the least one touching moment to do with the memory recall business that reverses the balance set within film of Henry’s identification as a man and as a male. Delivered by the one and only Tim Roth.

He’s not the only versatile actor neither. Sharlto Copley best known for District 9 (“Those f’in Prawns”) and smaller roles in The A-Team and Elysium is ,um, revelatory? It’s like his character was written in to show off camp, hedonistic, mild-mannered, punkish, sex-craved, hippyfied, trampish and a British stiff upper lip in an “all in one” role. If you watch it and I’d urge you to if I’ve not put you off so far you’ll get what I mean. It’s neatly done.

Copley excluded since his performance is so forceful for deliberate effect the acting is dire. Needfully so. Unless were talking LA Noire, Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls that kind of ilk of game even Red Dead Redemption or The Last of Us you simply aren’t going to get acting performances worthy of Oscar or Cannes in video games. Welllll maybe Oscar but not Cannes. And that is how it should be for possibly one of the best video game movies not based on a video game out there.

The themes I mentioned before all could be covered with more detail but I’ll just leave them there for now. Mmm nah no I won’t. The morality of converting the human body into something more than is never once brought up. A flaw for me. It’s never explained how or why the antagonist has his powers which also chimes with how the villains are introduced but not thoroughly explained within the MGS universe. This power in HH could be innate, technologically grafted or be a mix of the two or simply be magic. I like the idea of it being the latter since Henry is so firmly identified as being a bio-engineered super weapon on the side of science it would seem fitting for his ghostly white nemesis to derive his power from a source apart from Henry’s. A battle of magic vs science. Deception vs personal enlightenment. Talking of vs. Anyone seen the new batman/superman thing. It’s good but for your sake bet your glad I didn’t choose to write about that.

TL:DR   Hardcore Henry is a film. It’s a good bad film. Like a screamo band. Relentless in pace and very very blatant in how it pretends to be a one thing when it’s not. Interesting themes, some terrible acting. All round enjoyment if you can tolerate gratuity with dashes of gravitas.