Director Ben Wheatley’s new film is decidedly different from his usual fare, yet offers some of his usual imagination in a suspenseful shoot em up.
If you’re going to make a movie about a shoot out in a warehouse after a gun deal goes south then you had better end the movie with a lot of rounds spent and a lot of bodies on the floor.
Check and double check.
Free Fire is the new film from English director Ben Wheatley and executive producer Martin Scorsese, something the film makes a point of letting you know early in the credits. Genre-wise, a lot of people seem to be classifying it as an action-comedy and that isn’t wholly incorrect. Pigeon holing Free Fire like that might be doing it somewhat of a disservice, though, as it’s also suspenseful.
Because of all the shooting.
And the bodies.
And the waiting for the bodies to pile up.
Set in 1978, shady people meet in an abandoned warehouse for the simplest of exchanges; guns for money. One group are representatives of the IRA looking to buy. The other group are there to sell. Both sides have muscle as well as people hired to help facilitate the deal. Not surprisingly, the whole deal goes awry and everything breaks down into a massive gunfight. Add into that people working their own angles behind the scenes and you have all the proper ingredients in place for a bloodbath.
Once the rounds start flying, people are catching bullets constantly. No one is safe. And few of the wounds are fatal right off the bat. You will die from these shots eventually but not everyone gets their brains splattered across the wall immediately. That would make for an exceedingly short movie.
What’s amazing about Free Fire is its budget, just $7 million. And it’s still not without its star power. Brie Larson. Sharlto Copley. Armie Hammer. Cillian Murphy. But the cast honestly isn’t much bigger than that. There are a total of 14 characters in this movie, and that’s counting one person who is just a voice on the other end of a phone call. And this small group of people spend 95% of the movie in the warehouse shooting at each other. Free Fire is highly dependent on the chops of its actors and they deliver.
Cillian Murphy plays one of the IRA members looking to buy guns for his cause from Sharlto Copley who is there to sell. Murphy is engaging and intense while Copley’s character is arrogant, brash, and cartoonish. They are polar opposites in this deal where one is in it for the cause while the other is in it for the money. They immediately rub each other the wrong way.
Even if their underlings hadn’t started going at it and instigated the fight, the deal probably would have broken down on its own.
Murphy and Copley sell their characters perfectly, setting up the gunfight from the moment they lock eyes. Even if you didn’t know it was coming from the trailers you’d still know it was coming. Armie Hammer plays Ord, a piece of muscle brought in by Copley’s character to supervise the deal. He appears to be a gun for hire to an extent. Both he and Copley add in some much-needed levity, albeit in drastically different ways. Hammer brings that dry action comedy wit we’ve seen in many a Hollywood film where Copley is a cartoonish almost villain. ‘Almost’ is an important qualifier in this case as everyone involved in this deal is a bad guy. No one is the relatable hero. They’re all terrorists, mercenaries, gun runners, and/or unrepentant junkies.
The only character you find yourself even kind of rooting for is Brie Larson’s, though she isn’t ultimately any better than the rest. She plays the role of facilitator between the two parties, and a character both sides seem to continually underestimate. Larson is fantastic in this movie.
While this is a stellar and inventive action comedy, it is also suspenseful. The bullets fly and bodies hit the floor but the quiet moments in between are tense. Weird alliances form, or almost form. You think people might make it then they don’t. And then they do for another volley. Final bullets aren’t always final. The film dances beautifully between these moments, punctuating subtly over-the-top action against deafening moments of suspense.
And then the violence goes off the rails towards the end when people run out of ammunition and must get more inventive with how they’re killing each other.
One point of confusion is who some of these people are. The backstories or roles of each character aren’t really fleshed out that well. The viewer isn’t really 100% sure what Hammer or Larson’s characters actually do. The reality is that none of that matters, though. This movie is a snapshot of a moment in time. Knowledge of these characters beyond their involvement in this deal gone wrong is unnecessary to the plot and it functions perfectly well without extraneous info given to the audience through expositional dialogue or flashbacks.
Because you know that’s how that kind of info gets disseminated in less interesting movies.
It would be nice to know if there was a reason to set this movie in 1978. Given that it’s almost entirely inside the warehouse, the year is almost irrelevant to the plot outside of the aesthetics that come with the pseudo period piece. Like the clothes, tech, and music. Setting it in 2017 would have achieved roughly the same story. The only thing that makes sense is that in 1978 there wasn’t the overabundance of surveillance tech around so an hour-long gunfight in a warehouse is more likely to go unnoticed than it would be today.
That being said, setting Free Fire in the 70s doesn’t harm the plot in any way. If anything, it adds to the comedy factor.
Ultimately, the simplicity of this film makes it one of the most interesting releases so far this year. Free Fire achieves a precarious balance between comedy, action, and suspense that is nothing short of impressive. It might not be for everyone but those viewers that give it a chance will enjoy it.