Hard­core Henry

Com­par­ing films to video games doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly car­ry the stig­ma it once did, main­ly due to the steady infil­tra­tion of game tex­tures and lan­guage into genre cin­e­ma – Tom Cruise vehi­cle Edge of Tomor­row, for one, ful­ly embraced the game log­ic of resets and tri­al-and-error puzzles.

In the case of Hard­core Hen­ry, an action movie told entire­ly through first-per­son visu­als, the intent seems to be to mim­ic the video game aes­thet­ic more than any film before, specif­i­cal­ly the first-per­son shoot­er genre. In form and con­tent, it’s all there: a mute pro­tag­o­nist that’s effec­tive­ly the view­er, rac­ing to var­i­ous check­points, con­stant instruc­tions from sup­port­ing char­ac­ters, shaky-cam spasms as Hen­ry gets hit, and numer­ous weapons to col­lect along a killing ram­page to save a damsel in distress.

Except, the whole putting the audi­ence in Henry’s shoes thing doesn’t work, because the major down­side of Ilya Naishuller’s debut fea­ture is that while it looks like a video game, it also apes the worst qual­i­ties of the gam­ing expe­ri­ence. The open­ing scenes are intrigu­ing due to the sheer ambi­tion of the GoPro chore­og­ra­phy, but things quick­ly become both numb­ing and aggra­vat­ing. The numb­ness comes about because the film nev­er grasps that immer­sive qual­i­ty it’s reach­ing for; you feel less like part of the action and more like you’re watch­ing some­one else play a game on speed through with all the cheat codes enabled.

The aggra­va­tion is because the vul­gar world of Hard­core Hen­ry is pep­pered with limp attempts at trans­gres­sion, glar­ing misog­y­ny and embar­rass­ing com­e­dy rou­tines cour­tesy of Sharl­to Cop­ley as Jim­my, a side­kick who repeat­ed­ly regen­er­ates into new, annoy­ing guis­es when killed by sol­diers of tele­ki­net­ic ter­ror Akan (Dani­la Kozlovsky, in a per­for­mance best described as Tom­my Wiseau imper­son­at­ing Alexan­der Skarsgård).

Naishuller is clear­ly a fan of Crank direc­tors Nevel­dine and Tay­lor, espe­cial­ly since Hard­core Hen­ry con­tains an appar­ent homage/rip-off of the most mem­o­rable part of their 2009 film, Gamer: a scene where human avatars par­tic­i­pate in a sing-and-dance ren­di­tion of Cole Porter’s ​‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’. Say what you want about Gamer, but at least its mak­ers didn’t seem so inse­cure as to have its hero insist a pen­chant for musi­cal num­bers doesn’t make him gay.