Hardcore Henry

Dir: Ilya Naishuller

2016

*****

Many have said that Ilya Naishuller's Hardcore Henry is basically a movie version of a first-person shooter video game, and they wouldn't be wrong. I can think of a few video games you could compare it with, although my knowledge of current games is limited, I'm old school when it comes to such things and I'm also just old and don't play them anymore. The thought of a movie version of a game like this didn't appeal to me in the slightest, all I could think of was headaches, nausea and motion sickness. While I'm sure there are many people who suffered all three of those ailments, I wasn't one of them. I was utterly blown away. I've never felt so much adrenaline pumping through my body while watching a film. It's bizarre. Hardcore Henry is like being hit in the face but in the best possible way, there is no other film like it, it shares similarities with Crank and its squeal but it's like Crank on drugs, or should that be, more drugs than what Crank was on. The title sequence is a rather stomach churning but beautifully put together montage of someone being beaten, stabbed and shot. It's the title sequence you'd expect from a Bond movie from hell (I don't mean Die Another Day either, I mean actually from hell). This really put me off at first but then the story got going. We see Henry floating in a florescent liquid in what looks like a lab. Within the first ten minutes of the film, Henry is fitted with a new arm and a new leg, is set on fire on a bus, falls out of an airplane and rips the heart out of another man, with lots of fighting and chasing in between. There is absolutely no rest in the action for the entire 96 minutes, which seems like too much on paper but somehow Naishuller makes it work. The key to its success is in the detail. The characters are nuts and hugely entertaining, Henry himself never speaks and is actually played by around ten different stunt and camera men who all had GoPro cameras strapped to their heads. Sharlto Copley plays various different versions of a guy called Jimmy who helps Henry along the way during his mission, is real story and why there are so many different versions of him is revealed quite brilliantly at the end of the film. Copley gives an exhausting and brilliant collection of performances that I believe very few actors could pull off or would even try to attempt. Haley Bennett plays Henry's wife well and Danila Kozlovsky is 2016's villain of the year as Akan, the white-haired telekinetic monster. It's very fast, quite crass (although very funny at times), loud and ultra-violent, not the usual things I look for in a film but I loved it. It's so original, so technical, with amazing editing and camera work, fantastic performances and one of the most creative stories I've seen in a cinema in years. I can't really fault it, it achieves everything it sets out to achieve and I found myself enjoying something that couldn't have appealed less to me. It is the ultimate action film, the genre really needs to up its game now if it wants to continue in my opinion.