Hardcore Henry

For years, Hollywood has been borrowing heavily from video games when it comes to action sequences and special effects.  I guess we should have seen the writing on the wall that a movie like Hardcore Henry would be coming down the pipe someday.  This is an action film shot entirely from a first-person perspective, similar to a lot of popular games such as Call of Duty.  The gimmick is done well, but since there is no substance whatsoever behind the visuals and unique camerawork, a gimmick is simply all it is.  When all is said and done, watching Hardcore Henry is a lot like watching one of those "Let's Play" videos on Youtube, only it's on a bigger screen and you have to pay to watch it.

You don't expect a movie with the word "Hardcore" in its title to be subtle, but at the same time, this is an overly exhausting and pummeling experience.  I felt completely drained when the movie reached its abrupt ending, and not in a good way.  I felt tired, kind of cranky and bored, which is not the feeling you want your audience to leave with when you're making a straight-up action flick.  The film is written and directed by Ilya Naishuller, a punk rock singer from Russia.  He kicks his film off in an intriguing fashion, with a fascinating mystery driving the plot...At least for about the first 10 minutes.  Then the action kicks in, and the movie quickly degrades to being tedious, overlong and gory.  The relentless action grows so numbing that we quickly forget why we were interested during those opening 10 minutes, and then eventually just wait out the clock for the movie to be over when we realize the movie's not going to give us anything else but bloodied bodies being smashed and shattered from a first-person video game-style perspective over and over for the next 90 minutes.

Like I said, at least the first-person gimmick has been done well.  Naishuller attached cameras to a bunch of stuntmen, so we are seeing everything from their point of view.  The effect is supposed to make us feel like we in the audience are the titular Henry as he races, runs, jumps and fights his way from one end of the movie to the other.  I can only speak for myself, but I never felt immersed in the movie as was intended.  In fact, I actually found myself distanced from it.  It feels exactly like you're watching someone play the video game adaptation of an action movie, only there are no button prompts when it's time for the hero to perform an action.  There are lots of ways movies can be immersive, such as showing us an impressive or fantastic world that we have never seen before, and we get lost in the details that the set designers and graphic artists came up with.  But simply strapping a camera to someone, and calling it "immersive" isn't enough.  You need a world, a plot we can care about, and characters who matter.  Hardcore Henry has none of these crucial elements.

The film opens with a man we never actually see, since everything is shot from his point of view.  This is Henry.  He wakes up on an operating table in a lab with no memories whatsoever, not even who he is or what he's doing there.  There is a female scientist there with him named Estelle (Haley Bennett), who says she is his wife, and is replacing most of his body with high tech cybernetic upgrades that will make him faster, stronger and an all around killing machine.  These early moments kind of reminded me of the early scenes in the original RoboCop movie from 1987, which this movie seems to be trying to emulate at times with its over the top graphic violence.  Some bad guys break into the lab, led by an evil albino with telekinetic powers (Danila Kozlovsky).  Henry is separated from Estelle before she can finish her work on him, so Henry does not have a voice built into his mostly cybernetic body, and therefore can't talk.  Luckily, however, he can fight and kill in a variety of ways, which will make up 95% of the rest of the movie, as he makes his way across Moscow trying to get some answers.

The opening scene in the lab is the stuff that intrigued me, and sent my mind racing and wanting to know the answers myself.  The real shame here is that the movie doesn't really care about its own plot, and once it's established, it's largely ignored for the action.  I get what the filmmakers are trying to do, really.  They want to create a thrill ride, and the scene in the lab is really the hook to get the action going.  It's kind of like those rides you go on at an amusement park that might make you watch a short movie before the ride begins to help explain the backstory.  That's fine in a theme park attraction, but in a Hollywood movie, it's kind of unforgivable.  Oh, there are answers eventually given to us, but they are largely unsatisfying and are generally an afterthought.

Sadly, the visuals are not the only way that Hardcore Henry mimics many current hit video games.  The film also uses a lot of elements that teens and kids will find "edgy", but are likely to be tiresome to adults.  These include wall-to-wall four letter words in the dialogue, which often sounds like the screenwriter was being paid by the amount of obscenities he could slip into the script, a scene where Henry is in a brothel, and we see a variety of women walking around wearing very little or nothing at all, and rampant drug use by certain characters.  Instead of focusing on the characters or the intriguing mystery at the center of it all, the movie instead decides to parade a bunch of "shocking" images that don't shock in the slightest, or throw bone-snapping deaths in our faces.  This is a hard-R movie that seems to have been designed for kids who will gravitate to this kind of stuff.  At least Deadpool was an over the top R-rated action film that felt like it was meant for adults, but it just had a very silly sense of humor to itself.

So yes, this is an ambitious movie in a way, and I do have to give the filmmakers credit for at least attempting something different.  But even in a movie like this, we need a certain human element, or a story to grab us.  Just showing us endless running, jumping and fighting from a person's point of view doesn't cut it.  I have a feeling this movie will be a huge hit on Blu Ray, where kids young enough to enjoy something like this can watch it more easily.

See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!

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