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‘Hardcore Henry’ movie review

Russian-American science fiction film “Hardcore Henry” was released on April 8, 2016 (Courtesy of SIX Entertainment)

Richard Budd 
Connector Staff

Your name is Henry. You don’t know where you are or remember how you got there, but you’re alive, and a woman who claims to be your wife, Estelle (Haley Bennett), is screwing your robotic limbs on. Soon after there will be a psychic albino, lots of blood, a possibly-insane ally in a man named Jimmy (Sharlto Copley from “District 9”), armies of super-soldiers, at least one song-and-dance number and Tim Roth. Such is the premise of “Hardcore Henry,” a film shot entirely in first person that attempts to graft the first person shooter to the body of a kinetic, low-budget action flick.

Despite presenting itself as “First Person Shooter: The Movie,” “Hardcore Henry” draws on a wider range of video game influences than you might expect. Sure, there’s the inevitable “Half-Life” influence in the ways it delivers the narrative, and the occasional moment of “DOOM” and its popular “Demonsteele” mod-inspired explosiveness, but there’s also the color-coded, vertiginous parkour of “Mirror’s Edge,” the psychically-controlled clone soldiers of “FEAR,” a crowd-control cabin defense straight out of “Resident Evil 4,” the one-against-dozens neon-colored bone-crushing violence of “Hotline Miami” and more. On the cinematic end, “Hardcore Henry” is an unabashed love letter to the films of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, stealing ideas and set pieces from the likes of “Crank” and “Gamer,” as well as generally aspiring to their unique brand of vulgar lunacy and visual inventiveness.

Unfortunately, “aspire” is the key verb here, as “Hardcore Henry” winds up being somewhat less than the sum of its parts. Despite the pedigree of his influences, director Ilya Naishuller inexplicably decides to import all the dullest, most irritating aspects of modern shooters in pursuit of his FPS-as-film aesthetic. A good third of the movie is spent watching Jimmy exposit at Henry/the audience, a la any number of similar moments in “Half-Life 2” wherein the player/audience is left twiddling their thumbs while their NPC companions yak at them. Locking us into Henry’s perspective effectively kills any way of making this visually engaging, or at least seems to have left Naishuller disinclined to pursue any alternatives. When Jimmy gets involved in the action directly, he functions in the exact same way as every annoying AI partner in the likes of contemporary “Call of Duty” titles, shouting tutorial instructions and hints while funneling Henry/the audience down the next corridor. The film also utilizes the “go to this place marker, do X thing” structure prevalent in current mainstream games, to the point of irritation.

In many respects, “Henry is far more analogous to watching a “Let’s Play” of a shooter on YouTube than anything else, and despite the occasional flourish comes nowhere near the giddy creativity and fun of the Neveldine/Taylor joints and video games it cribs from so liberally. There’s a sense of Naishuller and company having taken the same approach to contemporary AAA mainstream game design as Zach Snyder fatally took in his adaptation of “Watchmen” – using the text as a storyboard to the point of disregarding the possibilities of executing this idea on film, as opposed to a comic or video game. That’s not the best analogy, I’ll admit; “Henry” is a better adaptation of its chosen ideas than Snyder’s “Watchmen,” for one thing. Nevertheless, the thinking behind the design theories choking the life out of mainstream gaming is so bizarrely prevalent in “Hardcore Henry” it becomes as frustrating here as it is there.

Still, Neveldine and Taylor are idols worth chasing, and between a short running time, the occasional great idea (whether stolen or original) and the welcome spectacle of real, non-CGI bodies in gloriously violent practical stunt work are enough to make “Hardcore Henry” worth recommending. See it at least once, and hopefully Naishuller will learn to cut the chaff next time around.

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