(The real MVPs are the sound design team: You won’t hear a more lovingly calibrated symphony of pings, pops and pows.) This is a director’s movie from start to finish, however, and the movie lives and dies by how well you think Wheatley’s attempt at a feature-length experiment works. Some folks score more points than others: Murphy does a familiar variation on his cool-cucumber Peaky Blinders‘ antihero Hammer will never not seem like an off-the-rack Jon Hamm, though his college-professor demeanor and casual smarm under fire do wonders for him here and you can’t underestimate the power of well-placed Larson eyeroll. The occasional wild card gets dropped in – seemingly random snipers join the fray everybody, watch out for those propane tanks! – but for the most part, it’s all ballistics and hardboiled banter. Once pieces get pulled, the rest of Free Fire‘s 90-minute running time is devoted nothing but one long bullet-ridden set piece, in which the various players get winged and wounded while scrambling around in the real-time cinematic equivalent of a bottle episode. You ever watch a film with a showstopping gunfight and thought, would that I could literally stop the show and just watch this for hours? Congratulations, your wish has almost come true. So it’s no surprise when a driver ( Sing Street‘s Jack Reynor) recognizes one of the other party’s hired help (Sam Riley) as the no-good, two-bit junkie fucker who glassed his cousin. It’s just a matter of time before the metaphorical spark hits the fuse. Money, guns and trash talk are exchanged. The Irish visitors want to buy assault rifles for the cause back home the salesman are happy to oblige. Set in a Seventies Boston of mile-wide lapels and John Denver 8-tracks, this high-concept, high-caliber crime thriller maneuvers a handful of round-the-way hoods, a couple of IRA gents (Cillian Murphy, Michael Smiley), some dapper arms dealers ( Armie Hammer, Sharlto Copley, Babou Ceesay) and their broker (Brie Larson) into an abandoned warehouse. British filmmaker Ben Wheatley doesn’t let his entry in the tough-guy canon tweak that formula per se – he just ups the ante substantially on the second part. A wise man once said that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.
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