Hardcore Henry (2015)

The first thing to report about Hardcore Henry is that it makes no apology for itself. A man wakes on an airship, gets cybernetic limbs bolted on, and spends the next ninety minutes being flung through Moscow at the speed of a GoPro strapped to a stuntman's skull. The camera is the protagonist's eye. The protagonist never speaks. Sharlto Copley plays roughly seven personalities of the same quadriplegic scientist, and the film treats this as routine. I have classified harder films. I have rarely classified a film so eager to be a carnival ride and nothing else.

For the purposes of our ledger, the field is nearly barren. There are no themes of intimacy to weigh, no environmental sermon, no reckoning with history, no lecture delivered to a captive audience. The lone woman, Estelle, is revealed as a scheming villain, which cancels any feminist reading and replaces it with a plot twist. The cast is Russian because the film was shot in Moscow with Russian money, not from any casting philosophy. Akan claims his wife's research as corporate property, and that is the film's entire economic argument, a whisper of a critique that exists only to give the villain a motive. Nobody here is raising anybody's consciousness. They are punching.

We are left with a technical exercise of real conviction and no message whatsoever. It won a Midnight Madness award at Toronto, earned sixteen million against a two million dollar budget, and was then swept from two thousand four hundred ninety-six theaters in a hurry. This is a film about momentum, and momentum holds no politics. We file it accordingly, with the faint regret of an inspector who arrives at a building and finds only a very loud, very empty room.