Never a more truer statement than at film festivals, where young, hungry fledgling filmmakers hope to wow the crowds (and potential distributors) with movies that may be pointless, plotless and mindless....but look damn good.
Here's a prime example.....a movie that appears liberated from a vault after 20 years, since it resembles one of the avalanche of dreary fake-Tarantino snarky shoot-em-ups that infected video stores after the explosive success of 'Reservoir Dogs' and 'Pulp Fiction'......
Chatty, sarcastic gangsters? Check. Everybody armed to the teeth? Check. Every character ready to stop hurling witty lines and start blasting away at each other, even if it makes no sense? Check. Generous amounts of screaming , bleeding and more insult-hurling, even as the bullets fly? Double-check.
We'll give "Free Fire" a passing nod for bringing back that long lost lost cinema Holy Grail....the High Concept screenplay......(remember those glory days when studios shelled out unheard of amounts, bidding on scripts with one attention-getting gimmick-y idea....."It's 'The Graduate' meets 'Out of Africa'!"....)
"Free Fire"s High Concept gimmick: take that well-worn 'shootout in the abandoned warehouse' sequence, which would normally take up the last four minutes of a low budget action film ........and stretch it out to the entire 90 minute running time. In other words......a feature length Abandoned Warehouse shootout.
Sounds like crazy fun, no?
No.....not really. Two opposing forces meet to conclude an arms deal.......Irish gun-buyers, led by Cillian Murphy and gun-runners, led by Sharito Copley. Mediating these groups. each with its own set of ill-tempered thugs, are a subdued Brie Larson and Armie Hammer, quipping like a game show host. Unfortunately for all concerned, a minion from each side have brawled the night before, touching off the film's endless gun battle.
You remember that 'look damn good' line we used earlier in this post? Yes it does. Director-screenwriter Ben Wheatley expertly orchestrates his warehouse war, staging it like a third-world guerrilla conflict......sloppy, bloody, with hundreds of gunshots actually finding their targets every so often, yielding painful flesh wounds....or worse. Just like a war, the combatants identify key objectives (a suitcase of cash, a phone to call for help) and mount foolhardy sieges to obtain them. Nothing goes well for anybody....
Breaking news......this all gets downright tedious in a hurry, even with the actors taking time to throw Tarantino-esque one-liners at each other while they re-load. Since this film is a director's exercise in pure technique and we don't give a rat's ass about the sleazebag characters.....the movie devolves into nothing more than a geek show, trying to goose us awake with increasingly violent deaths. (John Denver songs infect the soundtrack while actors burn alive or get their heads squished like melons......ho ho, ha ha...so clever)
They can cheer all they want for this at film festivals.....to BQ, it's still a one-joke, much-ado-about-nothing movie that wears out its welcome in about 15 minutes or less. 1 & 1/2 stars (* 1/2).....the half-star goes strictly to Larson and Hammer, who are fairly entertaining until they're forced to crawl around on the concrete with everybody else......
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