There was a point in time where Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire would have become an instant favorite for me. Around age 21 or so, when a cavalcade of bullets and some cheeky music is all it would take to turn my head, sounds about right. When I was 23, I thought Lucky Number Slevin was pretty brilliant, so there’s no reason why Free Fire wouldn’t have earned my adoration as well.
After all, there’s a lot to like about Free Fire. Starring Brie Larson, Armie Hammer, Cillian Murphy, Sharlton Copley, and a bunch of other people you recognize as that guy who was in that thing, it’s a remarkably simple story: One group (Larson, Murphy, et al.) arrives at a warehouse to buy some guns from a dealer (Copley) via a facilitator (Hammer). Due to a personal dispute among henchmen from each side, the deal goes bad and a shootout ensues. And that’s it. That’s the whole movie. Free Fire is a scant 90 minutes, and it’s all about the shootout.
In a way, it’s refreshing. The film starts a little unevenly, establishing characters and subplots that seem forced, and you wonder exactly what sort of rote crime-focused black comedy we’re in store for. After 5 minutes of these characters delivering pre-meeting dialogue, I was nearly ready to opt out of the film altogether. Nothing was natural or painless. But once the movie settles into the long fight, you can relax a little. This isn’t going anywhere else. There aren’t going to be any big storylines that disappoint you later, because there aren’t any at all. In an age where so many movies feel the need to out-twist or out-set piece one another, I came to appreciate the economy of Wheatley’s and co-writer Amy Jump’s story.
As you’d expect in a film that’s just a comic shootout, the gun violence is casual and typically played for laughs. Almost everyone gets shot multiple times, but it’s typically somewhere that lets the shootout continue. A grazing of the shoulder, a shot to the fleshy part of a calf. It also helps that all these criminals appear to be, if their shooting accuracy is any indication, off-duty Imperial Stormtroopers. There are some mildly clever death blows along the way. Larson, Copley, and Hammer all pretty committed to their roles as well, all smirking and wisecracking along the way, and never taking the whole shootout all that seriously – Copley’s character, for example, is consistently more concerned about his Saville Row suit than any harm he might suffer.
This movie is fun, but I am left wishing for more. There aren’t any real stakes established. Sure, there’s a bag of money, and the characters’ lives are at stake, but if they can’t be bothered to care all that much, neither can I. So, if Wheatley isn’t going to make me care about what happens to these characters, let’s increase the camp and make them even more over the top. Free Fire has some characters listen to John Denver* to establish a tone of no-substance, which is itself fine. The problem is that it holds back a bit on the style. Copley’s and Hammer’s characters are pretty well drawn, but we needed at least a half dozen more just as caricaturish for this to be as fun as it should’ve been.
And therein lies the main issue. This movie just doesn’t have the guts I want it to have. You’re already playing it a bit safe, plotwise, by locking everyone in a warehouse for 90 minutes and keeping them from really doing a ton of damage to one another. To also have so many characters be relatively grounded is a miscalculation that led me to a state of indifference. I was never bored with Free Fire, but I just never really cared. If you aren’t going to make me care, you have to wildly entertain me with memorable characters and some incredible, you know… shooting. Instead of an iconic, badass action picture, I got a bunch of imbeciles with unclear motivations who couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn.
Further detracting from the action is one other glaring issue: Despite keeping the entirety of the story in a single building, I didn’t have any clue where the hell these characters were in relation to one another. There’s nothing interesting about the location. It’s a generic warehouse, meaning there are a bunch of convenient crates for characters to hide behind and shoot at. And boy, those crates do take a pounding, absorbing roughly 83% of shots fired. And where are the characters? Um… behind the crates! That’s it. There’s a lot of confusion and comic crawling, and at one point a character even points out the incoherence, asking something to the extent of, “Did they shoot him or did we?” While I can appreciate a movie smartly winking to the viewer when it’s earned, this felt more like an admission of guilt, a white flag waving to me that they just couldn’t figure out how to make it all make sense. There’s no geography to the location, and when there’s only one location, that’s a pretty big deal.
Despite being incredibly incoherent in terms of action and the space it occurs in, and despite featuring a bunch of characters you really don’t care about, I still… kind of enjoyed it! Like I mentioned earlier, the 90 minute run-time plays a big role in a movie like this. By the time you realize the movie probably isn’t moving on to a second location, you’re already in the home stretch. And while it falls flat when it goes for big laughs, subtler jokes tended to work. Larson and Hammer are gifted actors, and they help make a relatively bland script a bit more enjoyable. Wheatley has some good ideas along the way, too; Free Fire just couldn’t used more.
Is It Watchlist-Worthy?
I’ll give it a couched YES. It’s inessential, not exactly a glaring omission in your film-viewing experience. But sometimes, 90 minutes of mindless shooting can be fun on its own, and provided that’s all you’re signing up for, you shouldn’t be disappointed.
Free Fire is currently streaming on Netflix.
*Can filmmakers please find something other than John Denver to play when you want to “cleverly” link 70s AM pop to violence? It’s not explicitly Wheatley’s fault, as this wave of Denver jokes all happened almost simultaneously. But it’s not a particularly clever juxtaposition, just a reminder to us that you’re not Quentin Tarantino and this isn’t Reservoir Dogs.