Hardcore Henry

 Technically  impressive, if vacuous, Hardcore Henry is a non-stop murder spree that simulates for audiences the experience of playing a first-person shooter computer game.  The film executes this premise effectively but one is left with this question:  what's the point? --  the movie isn't as fun as playing a first-person shooter and, for viewers who aren't gamers, the abstract non-narrative slaughter will seem pointless and, perhaps, more than a little tedious.  In other words, if you like mowing down lizard-men and fire-demons in games like Doom than just stick with the game.  If this kind of action doesn't interest you enough to play games of this sort, then, the movie will likely be insufferable and, even, a bit demoralizing -- after all, ninety minutes of gory massacre by shot gun, machine gun, revolver, saber, baseball bat, and various sharp-edged pieces of broken metal isn't exactly uplifting and, indeed, will be, to some sensibilities, disheartening.

At first, Hardcore Henry is interestingly abstract:  we see things refracted through water and, then, confusedly, in split-screen.  The movie is simulating Henry's return to action.  A beautiful young woman in a strangely revealing gown restores the dead and mutilated Henry to life, screwing on a prosthetic arm and leg.  Slowly, the first-person perspective comes into focus and the woman tells Henry that she loves him, putting a wedding ring on one of his fingers.  Lab technicians are sardonically installing a voice-box apparatus into Henry's throat (one of the lab guys asks Henry if he wants to sound like Louis Armstrong -- there's a selection of different voices on offer), when a bunch of bad guys, led by an albino named Arkan with telekinetic powers attacks the laboratory and guns everyone down.  The laboratory apparently is locate in some kind of orbiting satellite and Henry with his wife escape in a pod, dropping into Moscow where they are, then, relentlessly hunted by Arkan's henchmen for the next hour.  The film is nothing more than a continuous romp through various mazes and landscapes in which Henry blasts Arkan's enemies into bits and pieces.  Sometimes, he is aided by a character named Jimmy.  Jimmy turns out to be a young man that Arkan has paralyzed for some reason.  The real Jimmy is in a mechanized wheelchair and using a virtual reality simulator spawns an army of clones who battle Arkan's cyborg battalions before gracefully dropping back into paralysis. (The clones speak in a sardonic British English, a bit like cross between Cary Grant and Erroll Flynn.)  As we come to learn, Arkan has resuscitated the dead and turned them into killing machines.  Henry is a corpse as well but an even more lethal killing machine, probably because he is motivated by his love for Estelle, his wife and the woman who we see resuscitating him in the first five minutes of the movie.  (At one point, someone says that cyborgs, who are reanimated cadavers, are not very good on the battlefield because they aren't motivated to fight -- thus, Henry represents an improvement on the design because he is killing for a purpose, that is, the save and protect Estelle.)  There are battles with grenade launchers on rural roads, fights in skyscrapers, underground labyrinths, laboratories, and weird aerial platforms.  Henry mows down hundreds of cyborgs launched against him by Arkan and, of course, as is the custom in films like this, finally squares off against the peculiar-looking arch-villain atop a towering skyscraper at night.  Henry learns to his dismay that Estelle has motivated hundreds of cadaver-killers by pretending to love them.  He butchers everyone in sight and, then, apparently dies.  

The continuous action is brutal, often funny in macabre manner, and spectacular but like all good things too much of this stuff becomes dull and, ultimately, the picture succumbs to tedium -- it's got nowhere to go but increasingly ridiculous battles (one against ten, against a hundred, against a thousand) and there's no dialogue to speak of (Henry's got no voice) and nothing much in the way of a narrative.  I used to play first-person shooter games and enjoyed them and the picture, I think, fails on its own terms.  In the first-person shooter, you manipulate controls to run around in a colorful maze, encounter enemies, and, then, point and click to gun them down.  The pleasure in playing these kinds of games is learning the hand-eye coordination to pick your targets and successfully eliminate them.  The viewer in Hardcore Henry feels weirdly paralyzed, a bit like Jimmy in his motorized wheelchair -- the experience, which is supposed to be active, is passive and the viewer seems confined in someone's increasingly perverse fantasy.  Second, in a first-person shooter there's an aspect of target selection -- you see the bad guy, aim at him, and, then, eliminate the adversary.  In Hardcore Henry, the targets appear a split second before they are blown to pieces and there's no pause between sighting and killing them.  This renders all the mayhem completely abstract and, therefore, uninvolving.  Curiously, the picture shows a certain weird failure to understand the very nature of the pleasures afforded by the first-person shooters that are emulated.  (There's one exception -- a scene involving a sniper rifle staged in an abandoned medical center works well, but this is because it's more leisurely:  we see the rifle sight aimed at attackers, tracking them before they are murdered.  This is a lot more fun than the super-fast slaughter in the rest of the picture.  We can imagine that we are doing the killing and this makes the assassinations much more engaging and amusing.)  There are a few funny lines and sequences;  we learn that in Russia 50,000 baseball bats are sold yearly and only 50 baseballs leading to some amusing conjecture as to what the bats are being used for.  In one scene, the hero tries to mount an beautiful stallion and the score surges with the theme from The Magnificent Seven, but, then, the horse bucks Henry off and the soundtrack reverts to its characteristic super-accelerated punk rock themes.  Jimmy uses a half-dozen elegantly dressed clones to stage a musical number featuring a Cole Porter tune -- this is very grotesque, funny and even well-choreographed.  The film  has a sort of theme:  Hardcore Henry is mostly motivated by his love for Estelle, a figure who is a false memory and illusory (called the "power of the pussy" in the movie'scharacteristically vulgar Duke Nuke-em diction.)  But when Estelle fails him, Henry has memories, presumably from his childhood before he was killed, about his tough-guy father, played by Tim Roth in a cameo, admonishing him:  "Are you just gonna lay there choking on your own blood or are you gonna get up, spit it out, and starting spilling their blood?"  This question is accompanied by an image of Henry (I think) as a young punk hurling a complicated piece of hardware against a wall where it breaks into a million pieces, an image for the several deaths that Henry experiences in the film from which he is resurrected to continue his adventures.  When Estelle is revealed to be an agent of his betrayal, Henry is inspired to kill yet another legion of foes by this fatherly encouragement.  Everything about the film is excessive:  a scene involving a massacre in a brothel uses not one or even a dozen shapely naked whores, but, in fact, at least fifty blonde bare-bosomed prostitutes.  This is a movie in which you get your bang for the buck.

The film is directed by the Russian Ilya Naischuler and was made in 2015 .  Although the movie is essentially garbage, it aligns with certain ultra-violent films directed by Alexei Balabanov, for instance, the notorious Cargo 200.  The movie has the brutal, nihilistic esthetic of Balabanov and, for that matter, even the great Alexei German (and its horror-film producer Timur Bekmambetov). The question that the picture raises is what does this ultra-violence do to its consumers and can we trace some of the horrible events in Ukraine to this sort of cinema?  Probably not, and it's well to note that the movie was shot mostly in Moscow but also in LA and features some Hollywood performers -- indeed, it's an American-Russian co-production apparently although most of the behind-the-camera crew and technicians seem to be Russians.  But the idea of an army of revived poorly motivated cadavers without soul or conscience unleashed on the world may have an inadvertent meaning today that didn't exist in 2015.   .