HARDCORE HENRY (2016) MOVIE NEWS & REVIEW

HARDCORE HENRY (2016) movie

Genre               |   Action

Classification   |   MA 15+

Running time   |   96 minutes

Released         |   8 April 2016

cast

​Sharlto Copley ... Jimmy
Haley Bennett ... Estelle
Tim Roth ... Henry's Father
Danila Kozlovsky ... Akan

director

Ilya Naishuller

writer

​Ilya Naishuller ... (screenwriter)

cinematographer

Pasha Kapinos
Vsevolod Kaptur
Fedor Lyass

music

​Darya Charusha

film editor

Steve Mirkovich ​

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box office result

Worldwide             $​16,810,562  

Australia                 $ ​​n/a​

North America        $​9,252,038

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the best dialogue

Jimmy: Hold on for just a second.
[Steps out into an open courtyard at Akan's fortress]
Jimmy: [shouting] Akan's a cunt!
Jimmy: [pauses] Ok, coast is clear.

Slick Dimitry: You're half machine, half pussy!

Jimmy: All you got to do, is break in there, kill him, open up his ribcage, take out his beating heart, and fucking eat it! I'm kidding! I'm kidding, you don't have to fucking eat his heart!

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HARDCORE HENRY (2016) IMAGES

HARDCORE HENRY (2016) STORY SYNOPSIS

Strap in. Hardcore Henry is one of the most unflinchingly original wild-rides to hit the big screen in a long time: You remember nothing. Mainly because you've just been brought back from the dead by your wife (Haley Bennett). She tells you that your name is Henry. Five minutes later, you are being shot at, your wife has been kidnapped, and you should probably go get her back. Who's got her? His name's Akan (Danila Kozlovsky); he's a powerful warlord with an army of mercenaries, and a plan for world domination. You're also in an unfamiliar city of Moscow, and everyone wants you dead. Everyone except for a mysterious British fellow called Jimmy (Sharlto Copley). He may be on your side, but you aren't sure. If you can survive the insanity, and solve the mystery, you might just discover your purpose and the truth behind your identity. Good luck, Henry. You're likely going to need it...

HARDCORE HENRY (2016) MOVIE REVIEW

Reviewed by Mark Geraghty   |   Review date 31 July 2016
​Pop Movee Rating ⭐⭐⭐½

HARDCORE HENRY is what you get when you cross a GoPro, a no holds barred first person shooter concept and a music video Director making his first feature film. The result is an R-rated, high-energy, wildly inventive series of set-pieces that employ the same kind of disjointed logic as the PC games that it seems inspired by.

Russian Writer/Director Ilya Naishuller, who first used this first person technique in a 2013 short video, seems to understand all-too-well that 96 minutes of this concept is at risk of becoming a one-trick pony all-too-quickly. Fortunately, Naishuller fleshes out his story with enough detail to keep the viewer enthralled as he changes-up his settings and characters, forcing the audience into the lead character’s point-of-view for the entirety of the movie and creating something quite unique in the process.

Originally titled HARDCORE, the film became the subject of a bidding war between a number of second-tier distributors at the 2015 Toronto Film Festival. The obvious appeal was the film’s unique first-person perspective, where the audience effectively become the lead character. In this case, Henry.

The story opens with a flashback of sorts and doesn’t make sense to the viewer until later in the story. The viewer is given their first real sense of Henry when he is being tended to by Estelle (Haley Bennett), a Doctor who also turns out to be Henry’s wife. By way of some unspecified trauma, the viewer quickly works out that the story is set in the future, as Henry receives multiple cybernetic limb replacements in the first moments of the story.

Henry’s recuperation is thrown into chaos with an assault by the film’s chief protagonist, Akan (Danila Kozlovsky), who possesses telekinetic powers that make it impossible for his enemies to get near him. Henry and Estelle manage to escape in an emergency pod that is shot from the airship in which the have been flying high above in the sky.

Once back on Earth, the remainder of the film is focussed on Henry and his efforts to remember what has happened to him before waking up on a laboratory table. It’s at this point in the story, the viewer is introduced to Sharlto Copley’s Jimmy. Copley plays multiple versions of Jimmy throughout the film and some may find it hard to fathom what the hell is going on with him as he pulses in and out of Henry’s journey to recover his memory.

One scene in a high-class Russian strip club is a real head-scratcher, but, it’s all in the aid of creating a tone that makes HARDCORE HENRY feel like it’s akin to a live-action computer game. Scenes shift quickly and there’s not necessarily any logic connected to it other than to create an opportunity for another shoot-out between Henry, Jimmy and Akan’s henchman. In some cases, Henry is being pursued, in other situations he’s the pursuer.

Just when it feels as though the concept is done with, Naishuller and his Co-writer Will Stewart, pull back the curtain a little and provide some rationale for what’s been happening. This leads to an exceptionally well-staged, prolonged escape sequence that provides answers about who Jimmy is and his relationship to Henry.

​It would be remiss not to mention the graphic and gratuitous nature of the violence depicted in HARDCORE HENRY.

The gun violence is over-the-top and the body count, surely, must be one of the highest ever committed to film. The film’s story requires a level of violence, but in a number of cases it seems as though the Director doesn’t know when to say enough is enough. The film’s finale is exhausting in its excess as Henry engages Akan’s goons in a series of escalating fist fights, desperate to get the villain who has held his wife hostage and tried to kill him at every turn in the story.

There’s nothing subtle in anything HARDCORE HENRY has to offer, but Ilya Naishuller more-than-capably demonstrates that this format of film-making is a bona fide method and his success in sustaining the action is a credit to his and his production team’s skill. If you like unrelenting, violent, action movies then Hardcore Henry will hit you just where you want!

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