FIRING

Acclaimed Brit director’s new effort

LOTTERY-FUNDED British director Ben Wheatley’s last two films were met with a string of five-star reviews.

Most praised the witty dialogue, the surreal staging and the arty camerawork in the wordy A Field In England and the plotless High-Rise.

Curiously, none of those critics managed to explain what the hell was going on in either of them.

Thankfully, this latest effort from the saviour of British cinema is a lot easier to sum up.

Free Fire is about a shootout in a derelict factory.

The 70s costumes are overthe-top, the shooters are overly chatty and the soundtrack is overly ironic.

If I was writing this review in 1997, I’d have begun by listing all the other directors who were shamelessly ripping off Quentin Tarantino.

I wouldn’t have predicted that someone would still be at it in 20 years’ time. As the film was shot in a single location in Wheatley’s hometown of Brighton, much of its £1million lottery grant must have gone on fake taches and loud shirts. We’re in late-70s Boston and Oscarwinner Brie Larson’s Justine is brokering an arms deal between IRA men Chris (Cillian Murphy) and Frank (Michael Smiley), and gun runners Vernon (Sharlto Copley) and Ord (Armie Hammer). The deal quickly goes sour when it turns out two underlings (Sam Riley and Jack Reynor) have a beef from the night before. After that it’s basically one long gunfight. I was having such a good time during the opening half-an-hour I was thinking about dusting off my old VHS copies of Get Shorty and Killing Zoe. Copley was using his comic timing to devastating effect and Sam Riley was such a hoot I was happy to overlook his wandering Boston accent.

It looked like Wheatley’s wife and writer Amy Jump might deliver the requisite number of quotable oneliners too.

“Vernon was misdiagnosed as a child genius and never got over it,” is a great line, even if it bore no connection to the character Copley was playing.

But it didn’t take long for the old Wheatley to resurface.

“I forget whose side I’m on,” one of the confused shooters howls in the middle of one burst of gunfire.

You’ll know exactly how he feels. When you lose your bearings in the arty High-Rise, you can put it down to its highly lauded director making some sort of avant-garde statement.

Here it comes across as a basic lack of competence.

In one sequence, a wounded Sam Riley appears to keep jumping from one side of the screen to the other.

If you can’t let your audience know where one person is firing, you shouldn’t even think about staging a battle involving a dozen shooters.

As those numbers fall off, the laughs begin to dry up and any hope of an ingenious twist in the plot begins to fade.

In the mid-90s, the lottery ads used to feature a giant finger and the slogan: “It could be you!”

Wheatley has had that big hand floating behind him for his last four films.

It’s time for it to start pointing at somebody else.