Movie Review: Free Fire
Bullets Fly and Mostly Hit Their Mark
Free Fire is the latest action-comedy release from A24 and is directed by Ben Wheatley. It stars Brie Larson, Sharlto Copley, Armie Hammer, and Cillian Murphy. This movie premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in the fall of 2016 and is now getting a wider release.
Free Fire is a great case study on how things can go from bad to worse, leaving a spectacularly chaotic mess in its wake. In this rollicking movie members of the IRA (played by Cillian Murphy and Michael Smiley) meet to buy firearms from Vernon’s gang (played by Sharlto Copley) in a deal brokered by Justine (Brie Larson). Also in the mix is Armie Hammer’s Ord, who is a hired gun working for Vernon. These characters all meet up at a warehouse, and things get rough pretty quickly when Vernon brings the wrong weapons, and it goes from bad to worse when the drivers of the two gangs, who have a previous beef, recognize each other. Then the shooting starts. What ensues after that is a raucous gun fight that is, for the most part, a tumultuously fun ride.
The Good Stuff
Armie Hammer as a calm, cool hired gun. Ord has a collected and chill demeanor that provides a great contrast against the rest of the chaos. Ord’s been in firefights before, when it all goes to Hell, he is the only one not losing it. He’s one of the few people who has experience in a gun fight and it shows, even though it doesn’t help his aim. I also thought that Sharlto Copley’s character Vernon really shined in Free Fire, with his twitchy nervousness and witty quips — he’s one of the funnier parts of this movie. Chris, played by Cillian Murphy was another standout in Free Fire. He’s calm like Ord, but with a little more edge. He’s the closest thing to a hero that you can root for in this movie if you’re rooting for anyone.
I’ve never been in a gunfight before, but I would imagine its about as calm as my stomach after a visit to Taco Bell. The last 3/4 of this film was complete chaos. The confusion in the gunfight was a good thing because it made me feel like I was on the floor in the firefight myself. As each bullet would zing across the warehouse, I found myself enjoying the fact that I was in the dark about who was shooting all the time. When it is essential to the storyline you know who is doing the shooting and who has been hit. Another element that added to the realism of Free Fire was that every character has terrible aim, like abysmal. They’re nervous, regular people in an intense situation and I liked the authenticity of it. It was also pretty funny at times.
Lastly, the location was great! When the initial trailer came out I was hoping to see a movie where the warehouse was the only location. I wasn’t interested in the world outside of the warehouse only the action inside. The writers chose to do that, and the end result was a good, solid, self-contained story.
The Bad Stuff
No movie is perfect and although I enjoyed Free Fire there were definitely some missteps throughout the film. The characters felt a little thin sometimes due to a lack of development and background. Even though I liked the ambiguousness of the year, city etc. you know next to nothing about the characters and that makes the narrative a little thin at times. There isn’t any development either, these characters are pretty much the same from beginning to end.
Another thing that was a miss for me was Brie Larson’s, Justine. For me, this is more the way the character is written than in Larson’s performance. Her character is given next to nothing to do after the bullets start flying. She doesn’t have a lot of good dialogue and is reduced to simply crawling around in the dirt until the end of the movie. Granted, that is essentially what everyone else is doing after the first 30 minutes too, but their dialogue and story points are much more interesting.
Lastly, the ending of Free Fire didn’t work for me. I won’t spoil the ending, but it seems to be going one way — a way that I could see as the most rational (if anything can be called rational in this movie) when you run out of bullets and then BAM nope.
