Originally published April 10, 2016 on FrontRowCentral.com
People are calling Hardcore Henry a revolution in action filmmaking. Mounting a GoPro camera to a stuntman’s body and playing out an entire film from a first-person perspective is definitely a novel approach; no one would ever argue that. But there’s a reason this approach only works in short bursts, if at all. Without the benefit of a video game controller, it’s a disorienting experience, one that hardly justifies stretching itself out over ninety minutes. In attempting to reinvent the wheel, the thing Hardcore Henry fails to realize is that its square wheels aren’t actually better than what we already have.
The film opens with a man named Henry waking up after some kind of horrible accident. He’s missing a couple of limbs and unable to speak. Fortunately, Henry’s wife Estelle (Haley Bennett) is a scientist who fits Henry with robotic replacements. But before she can give him his voice back, Estelle’s lab is infiltrated by a telepathic madman named Akan (Danila Kozlovsky), who wants her technology to build an army of super-soldiers. After Akan kidnaps Estelle, Henry goes on a rampage across Russia to get her back.
The gimmick is that, for all intents and purposes, you are Henry. You see the entire film through Henry’s eyes, with characters speaking and fists flying directly into the camera. The effect is disorienting at first, and actually gets worse as the film wears on, but it’s not all that dissimilar to a found-footage horror film. It’s almost even more horrific, because someone tries to kill Henry every couple of seconds. It becomes exhausting after a while, like riding a really punishing roller coaster thirty times in a row.
With the camera mounted onto the actor’s face, it’s no surprise that the action in this film is extremely inelegant. Even though it’s all clearly and meticulously choreographed, there’s no sense of flow to any of it. The simple act of running even becomes a chore, because Henry’s head bobs up and down uncontrollably, looking down at the ground, behind him, to the left and right, etc. Certain sequences become damn near impossible to follow simply due to the physical demands put on the actor. Later sequences become easier to watch, as Henry is forced to navigate his surroundings more carefully, but the first act or so of this film is pretty damn rough.
The story is every “save the princess” video game plot you’ve ever heard, from Super Mario Bros. to Super Meat Boy, which is a strange choice for a film designed to look like a first-person shooter. Writer/director Ilya Naishuller claims he never set out to make a movie based on video game logic, but it’s impossible to deny the medium’s influence. In between every stage of Henry’s quest, he’s aided by a mysterious figure named Jimmy. Played with manic delight by professional scene-stealer Sharlto Copley (pictured at top), Jimmy pops in and out of the film under a dozen different guises to deliver the next mission in Henry’s quest or to offer Henry new upgrades and weapons.
True to it’s name, Hardcore Henry is a gleefully gruesome piece of filmmaking, constantly leaping beyond the bounds of good taste and into the realm of just plain mean-spiritedness. Not content to let a character be shot or stabbed once, people take multiple blasts at once, five or six stabs, a few twists of the knife, and what the hell let’s rip off a couple of his fingers while we’re at it. Henry uses any and everything in this movie as a weapon, from his own robo-fists to guns and knives to handfuls of broken glass and barbed wire. Nothing feels off-limits here.
But for as much of the film operates on an “anything goes” sort of spirit, it somehow isn’t all that much fun. This is a pretty straightfaced attempt at recreating the FPS experience as a feature film, and it’s about as entertaining as a couple rounds of this year’s Call of Duty. (In a nutshell, the question becomes “How do you feel about Call of Duty?”) With the method they chose to photograph it, and the look and feel of the end result, this feels like a product better suited to VR platforms than feature film audiences. In a perfect world, the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive would have hit retail shelves bundled with copies of Hardcore Henry.
Leave a comment