"Hardcore Henry" - Early Review

Unstoppable Mayhem

Coming off the success of the similarly filmed music videos "The Stampede" and "Bad Motherfucker" (Excuse my French. There is a lot of those sort of words coming up in your future if you are going to see this movie.), director Ilya Naishuller has made his first feature film and unleashed it upon the world. Filmed in a completely first person perspective to evoke modern FPS genre video games, the project is an ambitious technical feat. Does it all work? Absolutely. Hardcore Henry is a relentless burst of adrenaline and technical creativity that will most definitely achieve cult status and will be inspiring more action movies to come. You may also come away surprised by how how generously it embraces gamer culture and tropes while also being cheeky about it and tweaking its nose a bit. The above photograph is an accurate depiction. This movie going experience is not for everyone, especially not for the easily offended, but if this all sounds like fun to you, it will be one of the most original and exciting times you will have at the theater this year.

I will start as I traditionally do by giving a brief plot summary and in this case I really mean brief. Hardcore Henry puts you right in the shoes of Henry and is told completely from his first person perspective with the intent of transforming the entire audience into Henry in the most immersive way possible. Henry wakes up in a lab to be greeted by a beautiful woman who explains to him that he is an augmented human that has miraculously been recovered from a nasty accident. Henry has no memory and cannot speak, naturally. When the lab is attacked by an ambiguous Russian bad guy and his armed militia, Henry goes on a blood-soaked and nutty rampage through Russia to save the woman, get revenge, and learn more about his purpose of existence. The plot is basic stuff, but it finds clever new routes and is often fresh and exciting regardless of the tried and true action genre tropes that it is exploring.

But who came to this movie for the plot anyway? You came here for the innovative perspective and the explosive action, and oh boy does the movie deliver. The action is fast and brutal with blood quite literally covering the screen at times. The first person perspective engrosses in a way that is exciting but never seems unfocused or too chaotically shot. Even when moments intensify and Henry runs quickly, the camera is never too shaky. There is a precise elegance to the camera work here and you can always tell what is going on and what is around you. Back in 2008, I saw Cloverfield, which I enjoyed tremendously, but the handheld camera effect often became very shaky when the action and spiked and I got a bit of motion sickness in the theater. The benefit of the camera literally being positioned as one's eyes to the world, it stays relatively steady as it rests on the character's shoulders. The film is shot with a GoPro Hero 3 camera that is held in a contraption that goes onto the stuntman's actual head so it looks as precise as possible. The crew consistently finds new ways to surprise you with the filming technique and there are some very clever camera work that plays with it being through the eyes of our amnesiac action hero. It is surprising how coherent everything looks and it is a true achievement for the crew and cast.

What is going to make this film more divisive among the general public is how brash and insane its content is. This is an incredibly violent film. Bones break. Blood sprays in every direction. Heads explode. People are crushed and impaled. A lot of this is done by our titular Henry, making a lot of this violence very intimate and abrasively in-your-face. This film is also rather vulgar with language and sexual content out the wazoo. A perfect summation of this film comes when we enter a strip club full of undressed women and we team up with a crazy man with cocaine all over his face to mow down groups of thugs with giant guns. This can get pretty trashy and it can be a bit much for the average viewer. There were many times where the entire audience gasped and briefly screamed because of something outrageous on screen. The first person perspective intensifies all of this immensely. In fact, there was a woman sitting right next to me who often called out the film and was rather shocked and offended by what was on screen. Normally I would call a film out for being misogynist or trashy. What makes this all work without being repulsive is that the film is incredibly self aware and it has the cheekiest sense of dark humor about everything going on. Because of this, there is something smarter at play,

This film embraces gamer culture. This is very evident just with the way it is filmed. This is going to be hard to explain without spoiling some of the movie's best surprises and tricks, but I will say that there is deliberate casting at play. Sharlto Copley, of District 9 fame, plays a man named Jimmy. It is a role that constantly surprises and gives Copley a great deal of range to work with. He is having an absolute blast and he gives a great performance. The character of Jimmy is positioned in a way that is meant to represent the gamer. Or to put it more broadly, he represents the modern internet age individual.  It is symbolic in a way and I think you will understand how the character relates to gaming once you see how he fits into the movie. The movie in which he inhabits everything that makes up the gaming/internet generation. The sexy and often scantily clad or sword wielding women. The extremely harsh language. The over the top violence and overall anti-social attitudes toward people. This movie knows these stereotypes and views exist in the world and culture it is operating in and delivers on those expectations. Through its clever satirical humor, the film works as a loving critique of the tropes it is catering to. Instead of being plainly offensive, it is knowingly and hilariously offensive. It works as satire that calls out the short comings of this genre but loves it all the same. 

This film in many ways is a sort of modern day take on the "Grindhouse" films that date back to the 70's. Those films were meant to be exploitative and bizarre. They contained copious amounts of sex, violence, and bizarre subject matter. These films felt sleazy and dirty, but were incredibly entertaining. They relished in the filth and were all the more fun for it. They knew that they were dealing in low brow content, but they loved it. Hardcore Henry works as a grindhouse film for the modern generation; the gamers and the internet savvy. I believe that certain audiences will be enticed by this and will come to embrace Hardcore Henry for the nasty piece of work it is, but also come away with an interesting commentary of it.

Hardcore Henry is exhilarating. It is a grand technical achievement. It has a deliciously twisted sense of humor throughout. It is knowing. It wants to push buttons. It wants to thrill and innovate. It is some of the most fun I've had in a theater. If you have the stomach for it, please go and experience this on the big screen. You will not regret it.

Grade: B+.

Hardcore Henry opens in theaters everywhere on Friday, with special advance screenings Thursday night.