Critics reviews

The scorn heaped on the movie in the Western press has been notably virulent — if fairly justified — and suggests another kind of distancing projection. Critic after critic has called Hardcore Henry a movie for folks too lazy to play their own video games. (Watching other people play is a thing, and some even make a living from it.) For many if not most viewers, however, the first-person perspective gimmick works for about the length of a music video, but not much longer.

Jean-Luc Godard famously said that the best way to criticise a movie was to make another movie. Watching the craven Russian-American co-production Hardcore Henry, it's as if writer-director Ilya Naishuller was working the other way around – trying to vindicate the oeuvre of Neveldine/Taylor by showing what it would look like without finesse or cleverness.

The body count is off the charts, the means of dispatch including knives, guns, bombs, cars, tanks, flamethrowers, and a midair decapitation by helicopter cable. Ilya Naishuller, a protege of producer Timur Bekmambetov (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter), wrote and directed this debut feature, which should be rated I for "insane."

It's Russian – which some may deem unimportant in these globalised times, but it makes a difference. The film doesn't cheerlead for Putin's Russia, painting Moscow as a grim place, but it does exhibit most of the unattractive traits ‘Putinophobes' tend to associate with that government: thuggishness, brutality, casual homophobia. There might still be a thrill in embracing it as a blood-splattered, adrenaline-fuelled ride – but it's just so ugly, both in visuals and cynical attitudes.

Some of the stunt work is remarkable—I'm thinking especially of a parkour scene that leads from a basement through a park to a bridge, as well as a highway car chase in which a motorcycle is driven into, through, and out of a fast-moving van—but the movie's hyperactive thrills are very quickly dispelled not merely by their quantity, by the numbing amount of stakes-free violence, and by the combatants' monotonously undetailed and stultified world but, above all, by the absence of direction.

The Russian-made action flick Hardcore Henry mimics the experience of watching someone else play a very derivative first-person shooter with sub-Duke Nukem humor. But despite the undeniable "How'd they do that?" factor of the stunt- and pyrotechnics-heavy mayhem, the movie's slavish reproduction of game design tropes (mute protagonist, last-minute waypoint changes, exposition that only comes when the hero is pinned down or paralyzed, etc.) eventually grows tiresome.

Beneath the film's elaborate trappings, Mr. Naishuller reveals a worldview so rawly misanthropic as to seem genuinely traumatized — very Russian, it could be said. Its dour eccentricity gives "Hardcore Henry" a potency above and beyond that of standard-issue show-off action fare. That doesn't mean it's not still obnoxious, though.

It's a frenetic, gore-heavy, testosterone-fueled style that will appeal strongly to teenage boys and alienate almost everybody else.

The film's first-person perspective is so ingeniously sustained throughout the lean 96-minute running time that you're liable to swat at your face when a man covered in steel and wielding a flamethrower sets Henry on fire... The film's singular ambition is to immerse the viewer in the thick of a frenzied drive toward the promise of a lover's touch and a few more minutes of life.

With an unprecedented but monotonous body count, Hardcore accomplishes its unstated mission to create the cinematic equivalent of a first-person shooter. The title is less a description of its contents than a definition of its target audience. I have seen the future of cinema and it made my eyes and ears bleed.