Free Fire Review
Sometimes when you sit down in the theater, everything goes dark, and the movie starts, the film can have many impacts on you. You can cry, laugh, boo at the screen or sometimes you just want to leave. Well, that happened a little over halfway through the screening I attended of Free Fire. By the time the end credits rolled, I was the only one left in the theater. Well, I’ll clarify a bit. I saw the film on a Sunday afternoon and there were only two other people who walked in like a couple of seconds before the film started and they left a little over the halfway mark. So I can’t speak directly for them, but I’d assume they just didn’t enjoy it. Well, speaking for myself, I did enjoy the film. It’s not gonna go down as a classic or anything, but for a fun hour and a half at the movies, you could do worse.
The story focuses on two different groups of weapons specialists. One is the gun manufacturer and sales people, and the other group are linked with the IRA and will redistribute the weapons. I don’t remember anybody’s names, and frankly the film doesn’t do a great job at getting the names of the characters across. Anyways, the film is set in the late 70’s in what can only be Boston, though it’s never stated outright. While at first the sale seems to be going well, one of the hired hands from each side get into an argument that explodes into an all out war where pretty much every man and woman is for themselves. And that’s the whole film. It’s very reminiscent of Reservoir Dogs (1992), which a lot of people are criticizing the film for, but without getting too far into it, that didn’t bother me as much as it did others. Let’s get into some more detail.
Overall the film just has that fun vibe. Sure, a majority of the characters on-screen end up with lots of bullet wounds, blood loss, and violence bestowed upon them, but at the same time you get that sense that you don’t have to take the film seriously. There is a lot of gun fire in the film, obviously, and again while I wasn’t connected to the characters enough to even know their names, I feel that wasn’t the point. Ben Wheatley is going for, at least in my findings, that fun feeling rather than being a serious drama about a bunch of gun dealers getting into fights. I think he was successful in that. There’s a lot of great quipy one-liners from everybody that are really fun to listen to. Again, this has drawn a lot of comparisons to Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction (1994), among other Tarantino films, and while sure Tarantino is able to, almost every time, make characters we care for and at the same time enjoy watching them meet their ends better than Wheatley is, that’s a pretty high bar to reach. Sharlto Copley, Armie Hammer, Brie Larson, Cillian Murphy, and Jack Reynor star, and while none of the actors give particularly phenomenal performances and again none of the characters are given much of a background or story, you still enjoy watching them argue playfully at the start then get into full commando mode as they try and take each other out. When someone doesn’t die by gunfire, though, the deaths and setups are pretty fun to watch.
That all being said, there is a lot to criticize here. First off, about every fourth word is an f-bomb, so it’s not intended for the family audiences. That might bother some people. And as you can probably guess, a lot of gunshots are fired and lots of wounds are seen and there’s a large amount of violence. Those who are squeamish should probably stay away. We’re talking heads exploding or being crushed, explosions going off, chest, arm, and leg wounds, and blood all the way around. The film only runs for about 85 minutes total, and while it does take a little bit of time before the shooting starts, the rest of the film, up to the last few frames, are all about the gun fighting. Those opening scenes do take a while to get through and I was almost bored by the time the fighting started. And since there’s no B-plot or anything to cut to aside from the main conflict, after a while you do get the sense that it’d be nice to cut away to something else. And on top of that, not to give too much away, but these guys are guns dealers, not necessarily marksmen, so there’s a lot of shooting at somebody, sometimes right in the open, and missing with bullets ricocheting around all over the building. At times I felt the tension began to seep away because these idiots couldn’t hit anything. It’s like the first five minutes of the gunfight nobody can miss, then for the next hour they hit something sporadically. Also the editing wasn’t very tight and at times the camerawork was just plain sloppy. A few images were just plain inadequate and I couldn’t tell what I was supposed to be looking at or what was happening.
So despite the at times incomprehensible camerawork and editing, these can also be looked at as charming attributes to that 70’s low-budget style. Once again, it’s as if Wheatley is making a film that Tarantino would have made in the late 70’s if he was doing that then, and for the most part he is successful. This film is very much case-by-case: for every person who enjoys all 85 minutes of the carnage, there will be somebody who finds it a waste of film and the talents involved. Well, if you’re asking me, I’d say I fall into the former. Again I do give warnings off to those who are sensitive to foul language and violence, but if you can get past those and enjoy your Tarantino, Free Fire will be a nice 85-minutes distraction from the real world.
My rating: 7/10.
