Free Fire
Has plenty of fire; costs money to go and see.
+: excellent cast; premise somehow never tires; generally hilarious
-: occasional shakeycam overdose; did it really need to be set in the 1970s?
I’m tempted to deliberately not research how Ben Wheatley (and/or co-writer Amy Jump) came up with the idea of Free Fire, because an obvious theory springs to mind: at some point, one of them watched Face/Off (1997) and decided they could top the ending.
They can’t, but this isn’t Wheatley or Jump’s fault; it’s just that there’s rarely anything more funny than the unintentionally funny, or anything more ridiculous than the unintentionally ridiculous, and putting two actors into a shootout scene, which should be straightforward, becomes a radically different proposition when those two actors are John Travolta and Nicholas Cage.
So Free Fire’s first mistake, on this front, was hiring genuinely good actors, like Brie Larson as Justine, who acts as the go-between of sorts between the IRA on one side (Cillian Murphy, Michael Smiley, Sam Riley) and a team of international arms dealers (Sharto Copley, Armie Hammer, Babou Ceesay). Justine is among the smartest people in the warehouse when the deal goes south — which still isn’t very smart. Every act of idiocy has its own twisted logic to it — Copley’s Vernon just can’t give up the money, and everyone else just can’t give up shooting. It’s no spoiler to say at least some of these people die; some of them would shoot themselves dead out of anger in an otherwise empty room.
If there’s a genuine flaw, however, it’s that the film’s a little too fixated on this twisted logic. Like some other high-concept, set-up-a-thing-and-let-it-happen films like Cloverfield (2008), Free Fire fixates a little too much on its ever-escalating chaos and less on the bigger picture. Sometimes the geography breaks down — shots of people shooting and people getting shot are punctuated with wonderful Captain Obvious dialogue (“I’ve been shot!”) but it’s not always clear who’s ‘winning’, or where the battleground is shifting to (because this is, by the halfway point, a small-scale war comedy rather than any kind of gangster film). Or why this features the IRA in the 1970s, as opposed to any other terrorist group in any other era. But these are minor issues to gripe about afterwards — in the moment, it’s a hectic, gory, relentlessly entertaining…
…face-off.
