Movie Review: The brilliant “Free Fire” reduces the elements of the modern standoff movie to its most elemental ingredients.
There’s no reason that a movie that’s essentially just two-thirds unrelenting gun violence should be as fun as A24’s new bullet-ridden black comedy “Free Fire” ends up being. The argument could certainly be made that the movie is irresponsible on a moral level. Though the body count in “Free Fire” is fairly low by the standards of a modern-day action movie, the cacophonous din of gunfire picks up about thirty minutes in, and doesn’t stop until the film roars to its twisted finish. And what’s more is that when someone dies in “Free Fire,” they die horribly. Their deaths are prolonged, excruciating ordeals: criminals crawl around like infants on their bellies, getting cut up by broken glass, while pathetically attempting to bandage up their wounds with flimsy cardboard armor. This is as pitiful and miserable a depiction of the criminal life as we’ve seen in an American gangster movie in years, which is what makes it all the more inexplicable that “Free Fire” is as wickedly exhilarating as it is.
A spiky, smart-dumb 90-minute ride of lowlife squalor and unholy violence, “Free Fire” makes a strong case for being one of 2017’s most effective audience movies. This is a film that takes the standoff blueprint established in films like John Carpenter’s “Assault on Precinct 13” and practiced more recently in Jeremy Saulnier’s punks-vs.-skinheads thriller “Green Room” — strangers locked in a deadly, contained space, forced to square off using a variety of imaginative weapons — to its barest, most minimal essence.
What the filmmakers of “Free Fire” effectively do is take a bullet ballet that would occupy maybe ten to fifteen minutes in another movie and drag it out to an hour-plus of gleeful, nihilistic mayhem. What’s more is that director Ben Wheatley (“Kill List,” “High-Rise”) and his spouse and co-writer Amy Jump do their damndest to strip “Free Fire” of any instance where the movie’s trigger-happy heroes could come off as cool or badass. Wheatley and Jump seem to know that most, if not all, of their central characters are reprehensible, homicidal creeps, and as such, they take almost as much joy in offing them as we do in seeing them get offed. The result is a souped-up, invigorating modern exploitation movie with a hellacious closing shot that will have you howling for more.
As I said, the director of “Free Fire” is U.K. cult filmmaker Ben Wheatley. Since “Kill List,” Wheatley’s skin-crawling debut, a kind of deranged fusion of kitchen-sink Mike Leigh-style gangster brooding and occult horror straight out of the original “Wicker Man,” I made it a point to see whatever it was that the British filmmaker did next. I find his voice — pungent, perverse, unpredictable and sickly funny — utterly thrilling, and I believe he is one of the most original under-the-radar directors we have working today.
And yet Wheatley’s subsequent films, while each one possessed a great deal of merit, failed to live up to the standards of his unforgettable breakthrough picture. “Sightseers” cemented Wheatley’s obsession with the entropy that overcomes seemingly decent people when thy stop playing nice and start picking away at each other’s petty resentments. It was ultimately a stranger, less focused film than “Kill List,” though it contained many a memorable murder sequence, not to mention an enjoyably evil use of Soft Cell’s new wave classic “Tainted Love”. 2015’s savage dystopian satire “High-Rise” came close to matching the feverish highs of “Kill List,” though I know I’m in the minority on that one. American critics maintained that the film was too cold, too animalistic; all while missing the larger point that Wheatley was walking a very fine tightrope by critiquing the depraved behavior of his characters whilst indulging in their hedonistic bacchanalia all the same.
In many ways, “Free Fire” is Wheatley’s best and most enjoyable film since “Kill List”. It’s also unquestionably his most mainstream. Whereas the director once worked with casts of mostly British unknowns, “Free Fire” is a comparatively star-studded affair, featuring big faces like Brie Larson and Armie Hammer chewing on deliciously salty, profanity-laced tough guy dialogue along with gifted novices like Jack Reynor and the wonderful Sam Riley, who memorably played Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis in “Control”. It’s a testament to Wheatley and Jump’s sense of economy and to the lived-in authenticity of the actors that we manage to get a pretty clear sense of exactly who all the main players in “Free Fire” are before shit hits the fan and the bullets start flying. Once people start to lose their limbs and perish in balls of fire, Wheatley amps up the directorial fireworks while also allowing actors like Armie Hammer and Cillian Murphy — fine performers who are often trapped in humorless leading man roles — room to hang out, chew the scenery and add to the movie’s grimy gangland vibe. The result is a meat-and-potatoes crime movie throwback that’s as electrifying and shocking as it is coarsely funny.
I’ve heard a lot of critical consensus that Wheatley seems to be tipping his hat to Quentin Tarantino in “Free Fire,” what with a cast of mouthy crooks going tete-a-tete in a kind of human petri dish, before being killed off in creative, often appalling ways. To be sure, the main location of “Free Fire,” is a grimy warehouse (though, unlike Tarantino, Wheatley has conceived an elaborate backstory for his primary warzone) and the comparisons to “Reservoir Dogs” are certainly ripe for the taking.
And yet, I found the movie’s madcap energy more liberating than the more comparatively literary, stolid style that Tarantino has begun to develop in films like “The Hateful Eight”: another nasty film about nasty people and deteriorating moral fiber that unfolds in one cramped interior. Whereas “The Hateful Eight” stretched a pretty thin concept out to a wild, wooly, three-plus hour runtime, “Free Fire” is about as lean as these kinds of movies get. The movie’s gritty blue-collar aesthetic, cartoon criminality and detached sense of hardness owe a greater debt to pulp directors like Don Siegel and Walter Hill than self-aware cinematic mixtape artists like Tarantino. If the very mention of Don Siegel and Walter Hill gets you excited for “Free Fire,” you are the exact audience to see this movie and you are, like me, probably going to love every second of it. The moment that “Executive Produced by Martin Scorsese” credit went up — followed very shortly by a scene of Boston lowlives smoking heroin on a way to a gun deal — I was in like Flint.
“Free Fire” unfolds in a grotty, nameless Boston hellhole sometime in the mid-1970’s. The two smack-puffing skunks we saw in the opening are Stevo (Riley) and Bernie (Enzo Cilenti). They’re low-rent muscle, goons who have been hired to participate in the brokering of a high-stakes firearms deal. Soon, we meet the other interested parties: Armie Hammer’s supercilious Ord, a bearded stoner intellectual who dresses like a Russian lit professor, as well as Brie Larson’s well-meaning moderator Justine, and two stone-cold IRA killers played by Mr. Murphy and Wheatley regular Michael Smiley. The distributor is a mouthy South African arms dealer named Vernon (“District 9” scene-stealer Sharlto Copley, leaning into his native cadence to an almost surreal degree) who seems to have taken his wardrobe cues from Al Pacino in “Scarface,” minus any hint of self-awareness. In a telling moment, Justin tells Murphy’s thug that Vernon was “misdiagnosed as a child genius, but he never got over it.”
Before long, petty resentments and perceived slights begin to bubble to the surface, souring the already on-edge mood of the whole gathering. Vernon takes offense to Murphy’s character’s perceived lack of manners. The guns that Vernon ordered are high-powered assault rifles, but the boys in the IRA ordered M-16’s. And perhaps most damningly, Jack Reynor’s character, a shaggy-haired ne’er-do-well named Harry, has a bone to pick with Stevo, who is said to have violently attacked the man’s cousin during the course of a previous night out.
Soon, egos begin to implode. Feelings get hurt. Punches are thrown. There’s, somehow, tickling involved. And all the while, the lethal “merchandise” is being loaded up with bullets that look like they could tear through human flesh like a steak knife through butter. In other words, once the movie’s first act is over and all the principals have been established, Wheatley douses the whole damn thing in gasoline, lights a match and watches as it all goes up in flames. Kidding — he only does that literally in the movie’s fiendish climax.
As with many moviegoing experiences, we know (mostly) how “Free Fire” is going to end. We’ve seen many variations on this basic scenario before, and we know that it’s probable that only a small handful of characters, if that, will make it out of this horrible scenario alive. And yet, as always, the pleasures in “Free Fire” are not exactly in what happens, but in how it all happens. It’s amazing that Wheatley manages to keep the geography of the movie’s main “free fire” zone lucid and clear: we pretty much know where everyone is at all times and why they’re shooting, though at one point, a degenerate played by British actor Noah Taylor actually squeals “I forgot whose side I’m on!”
This kind of grotesque, lo-fi punk aesthetic has always seemed appropriately tailored to Wheatley’s interest in dissolving social niceties. The director’s primary interest seems to be that gray area where polite behavior withers and dies, and the violent insanity that can occur when people drop their façade of civility. Wheatley also appears to be interested in how people splinter into factions in times of desperation, and his command of mise-en-scene in “Free Fire” — best exemplified in a weirdly Cronenbergian montage sequence late in the movie where Michael Smiley’s bloodied heavy literally crabwalks through a nightmarish-looking air vent — is growing stronger with each movie he makes. One can only imagine what this bodes for “Freakshift,” the man’s next directorial endeavor, which has been described as a hybrid between “Hill Street Blues” and the video game “Doom” (seriously).
Wheatley is a professed fan of video games and though I’m not necessarily on that wavelength myself, I can see how the logic and geography of video games must have informed the layout of “Free Fire”. Though the movie is basically stripped to its essentials — there are no winking, verbose monologues, another Tarantino hallmark — Wheatley’s movie still finds time for small moments of character development, like when Armie Hammer’s bemused brain takes a break from the incessant gunfire to light up a doobie. The look on the handsome actor’s face in this scene is almost as funny as a later sequence in which Sharlto Copley’s venal and desperate would-be tough guy Vernon has a hissy fit as he vainly attempts to use a fire extinguisher… on his own burning body.
Hammer gave my favorite performance in the movie: his turn as Ord is the kind of rakish, self-aware comic work that Brad Pitt and George Clooney have proven to be capable of, and it’s a pleasure to see the actor in a less serious capacity than in, say, “Nocturnal Animals”. Brie Larson also makes a strong impression with a somewhat underwritten character, though there’s a certain cruel irony to the pragmatic Justine being the only character that we deduce might make it out of this madness in one piece. “Free Fire,” in addition to being a crackling retro crime picture, is also a movie that is incidentally about the follies of men: their boorish posturing, their wounded pride, their displays of predatory aggression when they fear they won’t get what they want. Justine being the only member of this frothing-mad bunch without a dick, she’s also the smartest, and the closest that any character in the main ensemble gets to being a decent, compassionate human being.
Undeniably, there are moments where “Free Fire” feels more like a kind of brazen grindhouse exercise than an actual movie. But even if that were true, what an exercise it would be. “Free Fire” is a master class in craft and tension-building and further proof, should you need any, that Ben Wheatley is the real deal. The movie’s prankish, amoral energy might rub some audience members the wrong way, especially in our country’s current climate. After all, this is a movie where men are casually set aflame, human heads are crushed like cantaloupes under truck tires, guy’s noses are blown off with snub-nosed pistols, and… well, I suppose I better leave some of the nastier surprises for you to enjoy. If all of this sounds like it would make you squeamish, then you’re probably right. If you’re like me and you enjoy spending watching charismatic actors playing desperate lowlives blowing each other to pieces, “Free Fire” will be an hour and a half of unfiltered drive-in movie bliss. Grade: A-.
