Hard Core Henry

Have you ever finished a movie that everybody hated and you loved it so much you think to yourself you must not be firing on all cylinders?

I had the same thing happen when I finished watching Water World. That movie was amazing to me but most of not all my friends beat up it as if it was trash.

I guess that is the same scenario with Hardcore Henry. To me if there is any fans of first person shooter games then THIS is your movie!!

Shot entirely from a first-person point of view and staged like a video game, this action extravaganza doesn't care about characters, but as an experimental exercise in pure style, it's pretty cool. Director Ilya Naishuller, of the Russian indie rock band Biting Elbows, is known for making similar first-person music videos on YouTube. It's trickier to sustain that kind of energy for 90 minutes, but he pulls it off in HARDCORE HENRY, borrowing ideas from first-person-shooter games -- i.e. the hero wakes up with amnesia and can't speak, other characters tell him what his tasks are, etc.

The camerawork is fluid and kinetic but still rapid-fire; it can be dizzying (there have been reports of viewers getting motion sick during screenings). Copley gets a chance to shine (or show off), playing several characters with different personas and accents. Kozlovsky's Akan is a rather dull villain, but Bennett is an appealing femme fatale. One scene even references Robert Montgomery's Lady in the Lake, which used the first-person perspective technique all the way back in 1947.