Cinema Trips: Free Fire (Ben Wheatley, 2017)

In spite of all the plaudits director Ben Wheatley has received since his disturbing kitchen sink/crime/horror mash-up ‘Kill List’ first put his name on people’s lips in 2011, I must admit that I felt quite sorry for him following the release of ‘High Rise’ last year.

That film was his most ambitious and high profile project to date by quite some distance, and, suffice to say, many in the world of what I suppose I’ll have to take to grit my teeth and call “alternative culture” were on tenterhooks at the thought of a director like Wheatley helming a relatively big budget take on one of J.G. Ballard’s most uncompromising novels. But, as the reviews began to trickle in, enthusiasm (on my part at least) swiftly began to wane.

Having your big break-out movie savaged by mainstream critics who have missed the point or were predisposed to hate it is one thing - but imagine how Wheatley must have felt, clicking on links as they popped up in his feed and reading a succession of thoughtful, well-informed writers and bloggers presaging their articles by declaring their earnest admiration both for Ballard’s book and for Wheatley’s earlier films… then going on to regretfully express their opinion that he actually seemed to have made a bit of a hash of it.

I mean, that’s got to hurt pretty hard – especially when working in a segment of the film industry that still relies largely upon critical adulation and word of mouth to push punters through the gates.

After such a setback, one might have reasonably expected Wheatley to retreat into the shadows and spend some time licking his wounds, like previous contenders Richard Stanley or Neil Marshall before him. But, thankfully, our boy also seems keen to cultivate a reputation as one of the most determinedly prolific filmmakers around, and, though he doesn’t quite crank ‘em out as relentlessly as, say, Takashi Miike (which is probably for the best), he’s nonetheless back in cinemas, less than a year after ‘High Rise’ crashed and burned, with ‘Free Fire’.

And, by god, it’s a knock-out. The cinematic equivalent of straight jaw punch, seemingly designed to to instantly obliterate memories of his previous project’s over-reach and indulgence from the minds of potential future backers – which thankfully makes it a pretty great time for us as viewers, too.

If there is one overriding concern that can be seen to have emerged from Wheatley’s work to date, it is a fascination with the ugly results what occur when quote-unquote “tough guys” (violent or ego-driven men of one kind or another) are pushed into situations way behind their control, often in confined and treacherous environments; a kind of anti-Hawksian dynamic that sees the “men on the scene” heroism of the traditional genre movie uncomfortably shattered into a million pieces.

This thread can easily be traced through ‘Kill List’, ‘A Field in England’ (2013) and ‘High Rise’, and we can perhaps speculate that what most appealed to the director when conceiving ‘Free Fire’ was the chance to spend an entire movie taking this notion to joyously ridiculous new extremes – with “joyous” perhaps being the operative word.

The first thing to get out of the way here then is to make clear that, where previous Wheatley films have tended to be somewhat dour, unsettling experiences, their humour arising from toxic social awkwardness and their tone black in the extreme, ‘Free Fire’ by contrast represents perhaps the first time the director has dropped his patina of "seriousness" and delivered more of a MOVIE than a FILM, abandoning his exploration of aberrant psychology and grim social realism to instead reward his viewers with a guilt-free thrill ride of laughs, shocks and lovingly reiterated genre clichés – a fun flick in other words, if admittedly one predicated almost entirely upon mindless violence and the wanton infliction of pain… but, we’ll get to that.

Very much a ‘high concept’ joint as far as action/crime movies go, the set-up for ‘Free Fire’, in case you’ve not read about it elsewhere, goes as follows:

In the seemingly arbitrary setting of Boston, 1978, a pair of Irish Republican fighters, along with their American street punk accomplices, arrive at an abandoned dockside factory to meet with an eccentric white South African arms dealer, his ex-Black Panther partner and their own additional muscle. The ‘fixer’ who brokered the deal is also present, as is the pretty girl who initially put the various parties in touch (because hey, it’s a movie).

The meeting is tense to say the least. The assorted bad-asses do not get along too well, and trash talk and dick-swinging are just barely kept in check. Certain elements of the deal are not exactly what the Irish agreed upon, but nonetheless, ten crates of assault rifles are about to change hands, and the ex-Panther guy is counting the money.

We’re maybe twenty minutes or so into the movie by this point, when it becomes clear that one of the arms dealer’s driver/loader back up guys has a serious personal beef with one of the Irish’s local hired punks. Attempts to resolve this do not go well, and, before long, the shooting starts.

About seventy minutes later, the shooting ends.

Filling the interim is a single, real time, one-location action scene that I for one thought was a pretty extraordinary piece of filmmaking, but please don’t just take my word for it – if you think this whole business sounds like your idea of a good time, pick up a ticket to your nearest screening, and I’m confident you won’t be disappointed.

I’ve already read some reviews criticising ‘Free Fire’ as a characterless technical exercise, but to be honest I think such an accusation is way off target. True, we don’t get a lot of back story to fill us in on the participants’ lives outside of this single night of carnage, but neither do we need any. This is a minimal, self-contained action movie, and thus what Wheatley and his writing partner Amy Jump wisely give us is minimal, self-contained action movie characterisation, of the best possible kind.

We may not get any explanatory monologues or heart-string tugging childhood flashbacks (thank god), but, in the grand tradition of directors like Hawks and Siegel, we learn a huge amount about these characters simply through their body language and the way they relate to each other, as we find ourselves sizing them up as if we were a stranger blundering into the room, trying to figure who to stand behind and who to keep well away from.

Naturally, it is the actors who must carry the weight of putting these characterisations across, and the cast – comprising a great number of vaguely familiar people who have no doubt done sterling work in modern movies I never bothered to watch – do it absolutely beautifully. Just great ensemble stuff all round.

Surprisingly for a movie so entirely concerned with action, ‘Free Fire’ is in fact an extremely talky film (even if 30% of words spoken are probably either ‘fuck’ or ‘aargh’), somehow managing to allow its characters to speak and interact throughout, even as they are in the process of trying to inflict dreadful violence upon each other, making the film feel at times like some strange variant on the perennial ‘Old Dark House’ formula wherein everyone is continuously letting rip with high calibre weaponry.

I don’t know if I made it clear in my earlier synopsis that ‘Free Fire’ is as much a comedy as it is an action movie, but, well, it is, and it’s an extremely good comedy at that, with these exaggerated, barely believable tough guys bouncing off each other like champs, as Wheatley & Jump’s somewhat glib, wise-cracking dialogue prompts more genuine laughs and post-screening quote-offs than any film I’ve seen in recent memory.

(As the most broadly comic participant in the shooting match, Sharlto Copley as Vernon – the South African – proves particularly good value, coming on like a cross between Maurizio Merli in an Italian poliziotteschi and Will Ferrell in ‘Anchorman’, as the other characters’ wordlessly contemptuous “is this guy for real?!” responses to his clumsy antics provide a constant source of amusement.)

As the shooting begins, viewers will naturally find themselves weighing up the chances of the different characters, mentally placing their bets on who they expect to go down first, who they expect to be the last (wo?)man standing, and so on. But Wheatley’s masterstroke in ‘Free Fire’ I think comes from his rejection of the predictable, slasher style “picked off one by one” approach that could have seen the movie degenerate into a coldly mechanical multi-player death-match.

Instead, every one of the eight or nine major characters manages to stay alive until the gun fight’s final act, keeping all of them ‘in play’ even as they accumulate increasingly debilitating combinations of flesh wounds and limb damage, meaning we are eventually treated to the sight of the bullet-riddled combatants hobbling and dragging themselves across the increasingly battle-damaged sets, lapsing into occasional bouts of unconsciousness before an overload of pain and adrenalin propels them forward, increasingly unhinged, toward the resolution of their own sorry personal vendettas. This gradual collapse into entropy adds a sense of Godot-esque absurdity to proceedings that, needless to say, Wheatley absolutely relishes as things take on an air of desperate, baroque madness – a zero sum game as blackly pathetic as anything in his previous films.

Alongside all this, it almost goes without saying that ‘Free Fire’ is an astonishing achievement from a technical standpoint – a total master class in good action direction, fight choreography and editing, as Wheatley succeeds in cutting between the activities of up to ten independently motivated characters occupying different positions within the same cluttered set, keeping things coherent, suspenseful, gripping and visceral at all times, never bludgeoning us into insensibility the way many contemporary action directors tend to, and only allowing moments of chaos to temporarily break through when they represent the confused POV of characters for whom events are simply moving too fast to take in.

Given that the bulk of the film represents a single, real time sequence shot over the course of what I’d imagine must have been many weeks, simply maintaining continuity through different shots must have been a Herculean task, requiring the filmmakers to keep track not only of the locations and sight-lines of all the characters in relation to each other, but also of the spread of props, cover, weapons, ammunition and so forth across the set, not to mention the ever-multiplying injuries and damage to clothes, etc etc. I mean, seventy solid minutes of fight scene must have been a tough gig for all concerned, but I think the efforts of the rarely heralded continuity staff deserve a particular round of applause on this one.

I realise that official ‘making of..’ featurettes for contemporary films are generally dull as ditch water, but I would genuine love to find out about how they went about making the technical side of ‘Free Fire’ work as well as it does, and look forward to watching any such material available when I purchase the film on blu-ray – as I inevitably will, on the very day it is released more than likely.

In fact, it is difficult for me to fully express the extent to which I enjoyed ‘Free Fire’. I genuinely think it is one of the best movies I’ve seen in years.

If I found any fault with the film, it arose mainly from the occasionally shaky application of the period setting; some of the dialogue and reactions assigned to Brie Larson's character in particular seem decidedly contemporary, and the Tarantino-esque 'needle drop' soundtrack also gets a bit heavy handed in places (it's hard not to cringe for instance when some Ayler-esque free jazz bursts in to accompany a sequence in which the film's only black character goes on the rampage).

As a marriage between the pure visual kineticism of a good action movie and the thespian chops of a good, multi-hander stage play though, ‘Free Fire’ works brilliantly, and if auteurists or future thesis-writers – ever sniffy about the idea of films actually being fun - may not wish it to be considered as a contender for Wheatley’s best film with regard to the realisation of his own personal vision and so forth, I nonetheless foresee it remaining my own favourite amongst his movies, by quite some distance and for quite some time to come.

Exploito All’Italiana: Blastfighter (Lamberto Bava, 1984)

At some point in this review thread, we had to turn our gaze toward that prodigal son of the Italian exploitation business, Lamberto Bava, and what better place to start than here, as a Commandoed up moustache warrior stares us down through the barrel of a magnificently rendered shooter in what must surely count as one of the most definitive action movie posters of the 1980s (maestro Enzo Sciotti in full effect, of course).

On the basis of its title and poster artwork alone, I had always assumed that ‘Blastfighter’ must be one of those Filipino-shot gonzo war movies that so wantonly proliferated through the final decade of the cold war – you know, exploding huts, chopper stunts, bloody dog-tags, the whole nine yards. So strong in fact was my belief that ‘Blastfighter’ was one of those movies that I somehow managed to read some stuff about it on the internet, buy a copy of it (from a SHOP no less), and put the disc in my player on one of those increasingly rare post-midnight moments when I still have the energy to consider plugging in the headphones and tackling a movie before bed…. all before realising that it is in fact a different kind of movie altogether. Such is the power of Sciotti’s airbrush.

Once I discovered that what “John M. Old Jr” actually had in mind back in ’84 was a comparatively restrained backwoods Americana survival thriller, I felt a tad uneasy, but I ploughed on regardless, and ultimately I’m glad that I did. Maybe it was the woozy early hours time-slot, the accompanying glass of whisky or the complete lack of any particular expectations, but, for reasons I can neither explain nor fully justify, myself and ‘Blastfighter’ had a pretty good time together on that lonesome Saturday night.

Dardano Sacchetti’s script comprises a neatly polished Frankenstein’s monster of parts repurposed from ‘First Blood’, ‘Deliverance’ and ‘Death Wish’, and as such ‘Blastfighter’ begins as disgraced hero-cop Jake ‘Tiger’ Sharp walks out of prison, having served an eight year stretch for blowing away the politically connected scumbag who killed his wife.* (‘Tiger’ is played by Michael Sopkiw, whom you may recall from Sergio Martino’s ‘2019: After The Fall of New York’ (1983), here efficiently embodying a 2nd gen photocopy of ‘70s Franco Nero.)

As inevitably happens in such situations, ‘Tiger’ is reluctantly picked up by a limo containing his former boss in whatever elite, special operations-type police unit he belonged to, who tries to convince him to come back on-board, offering him a prototype of an experimental new super-shotgun that fires every form of projectile under the sun as a token of goodwill. (Whoever this big-wig answers to, he apparently anticipates no “COP GIVES FREE GUN TO CONVICTED MURDERER” headlines looming in his future.)

Much to our disappointment as well as the boss-man’s however, ‘Tiger’ shakes his head and declines the offer of returning to an exciting career of legally-shaky, villain-blasting mayhem, opting instead to make a lonesome new life for himself ruing his past mistakes, nursing his broken heart and espousing the cause of peace and human dignity from the comforts of his cabin in the mountains of rural Georgia. He takes the super-gun with him nonetheless though and stashes it under the floorboards on his porch, because hey – this is America, so who knows when a steadfast, law-abiding citizen will need the help of a laser-guided, pump-action grenade launcher to uphold what is good and right.

To no one’s surprise, the build-up to that day begins almost immediately, as Tiger encounters a posse of perpetually whoopin’ and hollerin’ young rednecks who are in the process of decimating the local deer population, cruelly keeping their wounded prey alive as they sling them in the back of a truck to take home. Naturally, our hero must step up to confront such barbarity, and, as you might expect given his past history, he is far from diplomatic in his approach.

As it transpires, the rednecks are making a living selling the live animals to a Chinese butcher who is hacking them up for medicinal ingredients (the racist language thrown in this guy’s direction by both sides in the film’s drama goes unchallenged, incidentally), and matters are further complicated by the fact the leader of the posse is the younger brother of Tiger’s former hunting buddy and small town rival George Eastman – now a local logging company foreman who grants tacit paternal approval to their unsavoury shenanigans on a “well it give the boys something to do” type basis.

As the antagonism between Tiger and the good ol’ boys swiftly intensifies, the stakes are raised further when his teenaged daughter (Valentina Forte) tracks him down and turns up demanding some fatherly affection. (He had previously abandoned her to an orphanage after her mother was murdered on the self-fulfilling basis that “I was a lousy cop and I’d make a lousy father too” – our hero, ladies & gentlemen.)

Inevitably, the lecherous overtures the rednecks cast in Valentina’s direction add a slight pinch of ‘Straw Dogs’ to the brew, and of course we know it’s only a matter of time before Tiger is going to be pulling up the floorboards to retrieve his mighty gat, his tache bristling with a renewed thirst for vengeance…

Driven on by the kind of inflexible moral certainty that only a truly cynical production can muster, ‘Blastfighter’ happily jettisons the relatively complex issues that weighed upon its aforementioned source texts, instead choosing present its story as an almost pre-modern popular morality tale, in which a character’s courage and martial prowess is entirely dependent upon the righteousness of their cause (as solely determined by the film’s scriptwriters), and in which real world consequences matter not a damn, so long as the cruel baddies are vanquished and the deer can gambol freely across the wooded hillsides as nature intended. (Except of course on rare occasions when some fine, upstanding sandy-haired hunter needs to shoot one of them for food, or to humanely manage the population or whatever, which is wholly acceptable – look, Tiger agrees, and you’re not going to argue with him, are you?)

Legend has it that this movie only exists at all because the budget Lamberto had lined up for a proposed post-nuke science fiction project fell through, and, having already pre-sold it to distributors under the name ‘Blastfighter’, he and his producers had to cobble something cheaper together to fill the gap. Under such  circumstances, I think everyone concerned did extremely well, but, inevitably, quality still comes on something of a sliding scale here, with ‘Blastfighter’s strongest moments (the action and outdoors stuff, chiefly) sitting right at the top end of what you’d expect of mid-‘80s Italian genre product, whilst the weakest sink to an almost Troll 2 level of face-slapping stupefaction.

The latter, it must be said, is almost entirely a result of the appalling English-as-second-language dialogue, and of the especially shoddy post-sync dubbing with which it is delivered. [English is the only language option on my DVD of the film, so I am unable to comment on how the Italian track fares in comparison.]

Regrettably, this serves to reduce many of ‘Blastfighter’s character interactions and tender “back story” conversations to a state of borderline nonsense, as actors’ on-set lip movements are inexpertly matched up with entirely inexplicable pronouncements (“there’s only one way to get pleasure in this life, but one hundred ways to get pain – don’t seem fair does it?”) that one suspects existed only as “LINE NEEDED HERE – ASK ENGLISH DIALOGUE GUY” gaps until long after principal photography was completed. Thus, we must persevere through dozens of instances of semi-meaningless, generic action movie blather whose zen-like opacity will boggle the mind of any viewers actually paying attention.

(That said, I did at least enjoy Sopkiw’s spirited “You want to know who I am? I’M A SON OF A BITCH… who wants to be left alone!” – a minor delight which more traditional line delivery would probably not have provided us with.)

That this state of affairs renders it impossible to connect with any of the film’s events on anything but the very bluntest level is hardly a surprise, but it is a particular shame in this case, given that the film-making here could under other circumstances have easily scaled the dizzy heights of actually-making-us-care.

Indeed, ‘Blastfighter’s technical acumen is actually far greater than its era and background might have led one to expect. Editing, cinematography and action choreography are all slick to a fault, whilst Sacchetti’s script (dialogue aside) is surprisingly coherent and well-paced (quite an achievement in itself from the man who gave us the dog’s dinner un-storytelling of Lucio Fulci’s early ‘80s horrors). In purely visual terms in fact, this could easily pass for a slightly rough-around-the-edges Hollywood studio film - making it all the more unfortunate that the game is up as soon as anyone opens their mouth.

Sadly, such unwarranted professionalism also elevates ‘Blastfighter’ to that particular grey area in which a film proves too well made and po-faced for viewers to simply laugh it off and enjoy it as a brainless thrill ride, whilst at the same time it is nowhere near “good” enough to generate any real emotional involvement or thematic engagement, meaning that, at the end of the day, what remains is just kind of… there.

Less the yummy cinematic junk food promised by its poster and personnel, ‘Blastfighter’ is instead more like a plate of tasteless steak and potatoes served at a quaint rural diner; despite occasional moments of uncouth wildness and genetically ingrained sleaze (could the brief flashback to Sopkiw’s wife’s death be leftover footage from one of Lamberto’s earlier gialli..?) and an absolutely bangin’ synth-rock theme from Fabio Frizzi, those who thrill to the madness and degeneracy of more typical Italian exploito product will be in for a letdown here.

If on the other hand though, you suddenly find yourself with a hankering for a reassuringly one dimensional tale of men with moustaches doing the right thing, attractively shot forest locations, badly dubbed teenage daughters, string-bending lead guitar stings and cars that explode in the slightest breeze – well, dive right into these cool Georgia waters my friend, and you won’t be disappointed.

Watchable, predictable, kind of likeable in a distant, undemanding fashion, ‘Blastfighter’ is, in a profound sense, a MOVIE. It also features a lovely country n’ western song written (though not performed) by The Bee-Gees, which plays three times in its entirety, so that's nice.

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In closing, check out this interesting alternative promotional artwork (also by Sciotti), which I *bet* must have originated back when the film was still being envisioned as an SF-tinged ‘Mad Max’ rip-off:

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* Whilst watching ‘Blastfighter’, I was convinced that Schwarzenegger’s ‘Commando’ also must have been a key influence, but subsequent research informs me that that film actually came out a year later, in ’85. I must have just been picking up on the shared Rambo inheritance common to both projects, I suppose.