Hardcore Henry (2015)
Directed by Ilya Naishuller
Henry, a newly resurrected cyborg who must save his wife/creator from the clutches of a psychotic tyrant with telekinetic powers, AKAN, and his army of mercenaries. Fighting alongside Henry is Jimmy, who is Henry's only hope to make it through the day. Hardcore Henry takes place over the course of one day, in Moscow, Russia.
36 connections found
View:
36 films that influenced Hardcore Henry
What critics say influenced Hardcore Henry
One such picture, “Lady in the Lake,” a 1947 detective picture (adapted from a Raymond Chandler novel) directed by and starring a largely unseen (save for mirror shots) Robert Montgomery, gets a nod of recognition in the much more frenetic and fantastical “ Hardcore Henry .”
(Blink and you’ll miss a reference to that film, 1947’s Lady in the Lake.)
There's even a blink-and-you'll-miss-it nod to the gimmick's history in a poster, spotted on a bystander's wall, for Robert Montgomery's groundbreaking 1947 camera-as-protagonist noir "Lady in the Lake."
That cycle accompanied one of Hollywood’s most famous first-person flops, Robert Montgomery’s 1947 Philip Marlowe mystery Lady in the Lake, and it will almost certainly repeat itself with Hardcore Henry, a frenetic yet joyless Russian action film that takes its inspiration from videogames rather than Raymond Chandler novels.
One scene even references Robert Montgomery's Lady in the Lake, which used the first-person perspective technique all the way back in 1947.
Back in 1947, actor Robert Montgomery directed an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's Lady in the Lake, and in essaying the role of detective Philip Marlowe, he had the whole picture shot through his character's POV.
The rough-and-tumble cyborg mayhem recalls John Hyams’ Universal Soldier pictures, the final fight of hundreds of indistinguishable robot cronies is inevitably similar to a recent Paul W.S. Anderson film, and — even if not capturing their pure energy — there’s song-and-dance number featuring multiple robot clones that can’t help but make one think of a similar sequence from Neveldine/Taylor’s excellent 2009 feature Gamer .
Writer-director Ilya Naishuller is clearly most inspired by “Crank” crazies Neveldine/Taylor, so much that he even airlifts an entire musical sequence from their film “Gamer,” including the same song.
Naishuller, who developed his camera-as-mask rig while shooting music videos for his Russian alt-rock act Biting Elbows, has advanced and perfected the work of pioneers Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, whose 2009 feature Gamer starred Gerard Butler as a man whose body is controlled by a guy playing a video game.
“Hardcore Henry” is a jolt to the system and a post-modern pastiche of influences from video games (“Better Off Dead,” “Doom”) and action movies (“Gamer,” “The Raid”) that is sure to prove seminal in its own right for the way it makes its audience a plaything.
Writer-director Ilya Naishuller is clearly most inspired by “Crank” crazies Neveldine/Taylor, so much that he even airlifts an entire musical sequence from their film “Gamer,” including the same song.
It’s like Jason Statham’s Crank on speed... if that’s possible.
Cranked up to Crank levels of cartoonish ultra-violence, but lacking Jason Statham’s charismatic presence, the movie literally screams in your face for an hour-and-a-half, insisting that you’re having a good time.
It worked much better in “Crank,” for instance, another movie with mayhem, gore and humor hurling breathlessly by us as a hero races against his impending death.
Over-the-top-ness is what draws you into "Hardcore Henry," a film that can be described as a cross between the "Call of Duty" first-person shooter video games, and hyper-violent, semi-satirical action movies like "RoboCop" and "Crank."
At first baldly aping “The Bourne Identity” and then “Crank,” the movie sees a mute Henry wake up in an airship with no self-knowledge but a penchant for combat and a need to intermittently recharge his heart via battery.
By the time the novelty of the first-person perspective wears out – recalling that John Carpenter did the same thing nearly 40 years ago in the opening sequence of “Halloween” expedites the process – the chase movie template begins to weigh heavily.
That introductory sequence (prefaced by a dreamy flashback involving Tim Roth that isn’t explained until much later) recalls the visor initiation sequence of Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 Robocop, a similar tale of a dead man being reborn as a memory-plagued machine.
Henry is meant to be the detective of his own life, as in “Memento” or “Total Recall,” but piecing together puzzles does not hold writer-director Ilya Naishuller’s interest.
Advertisement
The idea comes from video games and, before them, horror’s occasional camera-eye sequence, famously extended by Brian De Palma in movies like Blow Out and his delirious Phantom of the Paradise.
The idea comes from video games and, before them, horror’s occasional camera-eye sequence, famously extended by Brian De Palma in movies like Blow Out and his delirious Phantom of the Paradise.
Moreover, the first-person device, which isn’t even new — way back in 1947, the Humphrey Bogart movie “Dark Passage” tried it; it didn’t catch on — is ineffective.
This trick has been tried before, notably in noir films such as Dark Passage and Lady in the Lake (both 1947) and sections of Strange Days (1995).
We've even seen the concept on the big screen before, in 2005's Doom, which adopted the first-person perspective for the final action sequence.
The video went viral and caught the attention of producer/director Timur Bekmambetov (“Night Watch,” “Day Watch”), who produced "Hardcore Henry."
Onstage before one Toronto film festival screenig, Naishuller admitted he worried when approached by producer Timur Bekmambetov (“Night Watch”) whether expanding upon his musicvideos (esp.
The pair’s affinity is easily spotted in the finished product, which has an anything-goes energy and a foreign idiosyncrasy similar to Bekmambetov’s “Night Watch.”
(No surprise that the film was produced by Timur Bekmambetov, who's become a bellwether for this sort of dude's-dude cinema thanks to Wanted and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.)
For better and worse—mostly the latter—the tiresome orgy of blood and bombast is exactly the sort of thing you might expect from a collaboration between wild Russian producer Timur Bekmambetov (whose movies can be junky fun—think “Wanted” and “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Killer”) and a rock music video impresario, Ilya Naishuller, who’s here making his debut as a writer-director (though one has to say that the “writing” part can’t have been too arduous a task).
The video went viral and caught the attention of producer/director Timur Bekmambetov (“Night Watch,” “Day Watch”), who produced "Hardcore Henry."
(No surprise that the film was produced by Timur Bekmambetov, who's become a bellwether for this sort of dude's-dude cinema thanks to Wanted and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.)
That drew the attention of Naishuller’s countryman, Timur Bekmambetov (“Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”), who helped produce the film along with crowdsourced money through Indiegogo.
Advertisement
I’m old enough to remember when people complained about the shaky-cam in Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives giving them nausea; much of Hardcore Henry feels like watching what your two-year-old filmed when he got a hold of your iPhone and didn’t realize he’d turned on the camera.
Purposefully one-note, the film has been compared, not unfairly, to Run Lola Run and first-person shooters, but its audacity is closer to that of Russia's extreme climbers, who also thrive on flaunting their fearlessness and resourcefulness in ways that feel like an extension of and resistance to the postmodern masculine ideal foisted on them in the age of Vladimir Putin.
"Run Lola Run" with severed heads and sci-fi trappings, the picture never stops moving long enough to be bothered by anything but the sheer visceral exploits on display as Henry races around, mowing down anyone who poses a threat or stands in his way of learning the truth.