a5c7b9f00b Set in Boston in 1978, a meeting in a deserted warehouse between two gangs turns into a shootout and a game of survival. What a terrific film; 30 minutes tense set-up of an arms deal going wrong, followed by an hour long gun fight. Incredibly, it&#39;s all coherent and there&#39;s a plot and characters with depthwellbeing to gun fights what The Raid is to martial arts movies. Great stuff I don&#39;t think Ben Wheatley had any grand gestures or even something majorfarmaking an &quot;artistic&quot; statement with Free Fire (except, of course, for his love of 70&#39;s and 90&#39;s crime movies - I make this distinction since it has the look and feel of the former, but the attitude and violence and dialog of the latter, specifically a Tarantino knock-off, but in the best possible sense, the spirit but that&#39;s all). That&#39;s a good thing I think: to simply aim to entertainhis goal, Wheatley does a fantastic job at making an violent, intense bottle film that, if it&#39;s about anything at all, it concerns what happens when rage and fear and simply anxious nerves get the better of otherwise &#39;professional&#39; men. Oh, and did I mention it&#39;s violent? Yep, it certainly is!<br/><br/>And yet, I should add, it&#39;s notgratuitousone might expect given Wheatley&#39;s pedigreea provocateur of hardcore masculine cinema (see Kill List or A Field in England for a filmmaker who may have a lot of raw energy, and finds a way to make movies about men who act out on this energy). It&#39;s an 85 minute movie, and while more than two-thirds of the run-time are allotted for the shoot-out that happens between the rival sides (it&#39;s all about selling some guns between Sharlto Copley and Cillian Murphy - not even the right guns, of course,it turns out, and then two of the hired thugs on each side realize they know each other and are out for blood), it doesn&#39;t get so repetitiveto become boring or tiresome.<br/><br/>On the contrary, there&#39;s a fascination in that suspenseful way that reminded me in a way of that one memorable scene in Hitchcock&#39;s Torn Curtain: when you are trying to kill somebody, it&#39;s nevereasythe movies look, and there&#39;s a grim, sick but full-of-belly laughter to be hadthe characters writhe around. That&#39;s the pervading image to take away from Free Fire: characters are often seen crawling along, sometimes ridden with bullets and other times only with a few but annoying grazes on their shoulders or arms, and it&#39;s like watching a comically hysterical battle scene going on, where people are huddled in this dingy warehouse (one of the great *locations* in modern movie history, full of dangers at every little step), and where surprises end up coming around here and there to heighten the tension.<br/><br/>Did I mention that this is funny? The compliment that maybe Wheatley could take from being compared to Tarantino is that his movie is more of a comedy in a lot of ways than an action movie - it certainly is that crime movie genre of guys (and one woman, Brie Larson who shinessomeone who can get shot and fight back justwell, if not tougher, than the guys) - and that&#39;s due to the script giving the actors much to work with, but it&#39;s also because of the actors and how quickly their wit plays off one another (surprisingly for me Copley hasn&#39;t been this game for a sleazy scumbag of a character in… a long while anyway). I think that audiences either find such scummy low- lifes amusing at the ends of their ropes, perhaps, just maybe, when the vulnerability of life or death (and how much they might care), or they don&#39;t; the violence helps I think,it is heightened and exciting and, in the last fifteen minutes or so especially, it gets wilder and more graphic.<br/><br/>Free Fire is unpretentious, compact, and kick-ass; it&#39;s surprising too to see something like A Field in England only a few months ago, which really *does* reach for ambitious and surreal ground, and then to go into this which is out to give its audience a good time. I don&#39;t know if all will take to it since it is so relentless, but those who look for it will see a filmmaker working out a solid pace for the shooting - high and lows and ebbs and flows - and that it&#39;s dominated more by the personalitieswe grow to sort of like (if not care for) these f***ing bastards. There’s a decent amount of craft on display, along with a filmmaker of genuine chutzpah. Throw just a little restraint into the mix, and you might really have something.
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367 weeks ago