Free Fire: Death, violence as it really is
Print Edition
THE shootout, often a ballet, is a battle royale in Ben Wheatley’s “Free Fire.”
When the bullets start flying, Wheatley’s arms-deal-gone-wrong 1970s shoot-up comes to a crawl. There’s a total absence of slow-motion cartwheels. No one miraculously walks through a wall of fire to kill the bad guys with three precise shots. Not a single Scarlett Johansson roundhouse kick is in the house.
Instead, people get maimed, bloodied and dead. There’s no subsequent chase or flight from the police, just bickering and trench warfare ... for most of the 90-minute film. The movie is 100 percent OK Corral.
It’s a formally impressive feat — set almost entirely in the same rundown warehouse — but a thin and tedious one.
The film, the British director’s sixth, spends its first third gathering an ensemble of retro-fitted characters under the glistening wet of a dark Massachusetts night.
It’s an international, much-mustachioed array of characters. A handful of Irish Republican Army agents (Cillian Murphy, Michael Smiley) are meeting gun sellers (Sharlto Copley’s South African; Babou Ceesay’s former Black Panther). The deal has been brokered by a pair of savvy Americans (Brie Larson’s Justine, Armie Hammer’s turtle-necked Ord) and then there are a couple locals, Stevo (Sam Riley) and Bernie (Enzo Cilenti) brought in to carry the crates of assault weapons.
The channeled spirit here — irreverent and violent — is undoubtedly “Reservoir Dogs”-era Quentin Tarantino. But “Free Fire” reminded me more of a short by its executive producer, Martin Scorsese: his 1967 six-minute “The Big Shave” showed a man who keeps cutting himself shaving until his face is a bloody mess — the Vietnam War in a nutshell.
“Free Fire,” too, would seem a satirical metaphor on warfare, where guns plus an international group of posturing wannabe tough-guys equals mutual destruction.
Wheatley is clearly enjoying himself, crisscrossing chaos to the comic limit, even while his characters limp along behind.
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