Hardcore Henry

Hardcore Henry (2015)

55% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 76 reviews)

Runtime: 96 minutes

Directed by: Ilya Naishuller

Starring: Sharlto Copley, Haley Bennett, Danila Kozlovsky, Andrei Dementiev, Tim Roth... in a glorified cameo

From: Bazelevs Production/Versus Pictures

I saw the debut of this film last night at a new movie theatre; it was another Epic Theatres location, but this one is in the Southeastern part of Orlando by the International Airport. It looks nice and all, but I won't be back there anytime soon. The way some of the staff treated me, the not customer friendly layout, a lot of the electronic things aside from the lights and projectors not working right... there are plenty of places I can go instead. The nice electric reclining chairs (no joke) they had there can't make up for those faults.

Anyhow, my opinion of this at times nauseating (and not because of its graphic violence) movie is below via Letterboxd:

NOTE: This is important that I start this review off with a message for everyone who wants to see this but hasn't yet: remember in the past how theatres had to put up notices that The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield could make you feel nauseous due to the camera shaking around? Well, I saw both on the big screen and had no issue with either. This film, as it's all first person the camera usually isn't steady so whenever there's any action... I thought I'd be OK with it but for much of the second act I was not feeling 100% and a few times I had to look away. Thankfully I felt better by the final act but this was something that needed to be said at the beginning of this review and yes, it did ultimately affect my rating of this.

Last night I had free time so I went and saw the debut of a film that I've known of for a long while; the first ever first person movie that's basically a first person shooter on the big screen is something that will stick in my head forever. I saw the trailer with the Queen song Can't Stop Me Now (which did appear in the movie, in a memorable way) and that was awesome so I was hoping I would enjoy this wacky concept of a man who becomes a cyborg and he's on the run as he tries to protect his lady (Haley Bennett, who was made to look as much as Jennifer Lawrence as possible) from a villain that acted and looked like he was straight from something like Dragonball or Bleach... and it all takes place in Russia.

As for the movie itself... from the trailer I had no idea how weird this would be. I mean, comparing this to Crank or Crank 2: High Voltage (at times the movie seems to do direct homages to those films), that over the top duo of motion pictures actually seem normal. The story is just so strange and out there and filled with over the top moments; to paraphrase a general quote I have seen elsewhere, I won't spoil anything because people probably wouldn't believe it and I couldn't try to explain what the plot is anyway, as how do you explain something you do not understand? Honestly, if it wasn't for some moments that could be argued as being rather misogynistic, I could say that this would have been written by me... if I was on bath salts! There is a lot of graphic violence, nudity, foul language, drug use, and other things that make it a hard R rated picture.

The performances are about what you'd expect from something like this. Sharlto Copley, what a role for him. One scene he was in just about left me gobsmacked, and I'll leave it at that. The score was rather, um, interesting. The popular songs you do hear, they were unexpected. To sum it all up, if you love over the top action movies and/or first person shooters-I've only dabbled a little bit in that gaming genre-then you'll probably love this... as long as you don't get motion sickness, that is.