A mad contraption that bristles with bravado and wit
Free Fire takes place in 1978, and has the shoulder pads and Paisley patterned blouse to prove it. But the film’s spiritual calendar – the zeitgeist that blows through it with a contagious, bone-tickling chill – is turned to End Times. The callously uproarious new film from Ben Wheatley takes place almost entirely inside a tumbledown harbourside warehouse in Boston, Massachusetts, where an IRA delegation are collecting a shipment of assault rifles from a yawping South African gun-runner and his seamy associates.
The place looks like the lessscenic aftermath of a nuclear attack: “Whatever they used to make here, nobody wants it now,” observes IRA dealmaker Chris (Cillian Murphy), as he and his cohort are led through the rubble towards their fateful rendezvous with Vernon (Sharlto Copley, operating just within the uppermost limits of stomachability) and his van-load of Beretta AR-70s.
The only things that matter are the weapons and money – lives come a distant third: in short, there’s nothing worth fighting over. Wheatley’s sixth feature is the kind of film you sense might have been made on a dare. Because when the deal goes south – as it inevitably does – the film devolves into a 12-way shoot-out which keeps blazing, yelling, limping and leaking blood right up to the final cut to black.
The challenge faced by the Sightseers and Kill List director – along, with his regular co-writer Amy Jump and their impeccable ensemble cast – is simple but testing: bringing excitement, tension and purpose to what’s ultimately an idiotic and pointless bloodbath. It’s a heroic group effort, resoundingly carried off. Suave middleman Ord (a luxuriantly bearded Armie Hammer) and enigmatic facilitator Justine (recent Oscarwinner Brie Larson) are the closest to sympathetic characters. But when the bullets start swarming, they become as brutal and reckless as the more alphatype scumbags around them.
Alongside Murphy on the IRA side, there’s grizzled Frank (Michael Smiley, terrific) and dumb hired muscle Stevo and Bernie (Sam Riley and Enzo Cilenti), while Vernon’s associates include Martin (Babou Ceesay), Harry (a superb Jack Reynor) and Gordon (Noah Taylor), each of whom has their own agenda.
If you’re wondering who the 11th and 12th participants are, Wheatley keeps a couple of wild cards up his sleeve, which sets up a touchingly despairing one-liner from Reynor around the halfway point: “Who the f--- is shooting at us now?” – a line that embodies the standoffish, joke’s-on-them shrug with which Free Fire is carried off. The fashion choices are almost as loud as the deafening muzzle blasts and twanging ricochets.
It’s the kind of merry mayhem that demands steely precision in terms of technique, but that’s in plentiful supply – not least in Wheatley and Jump’s whip-crack editing, Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury’s burping, parping free jazz score, and Laurie Rose’s dependably great cinematography, all jam-sticky colours and high-fibre visual grit.
Far more than his previous films, which tend to unfold in a dream-like daze, Free Fire is a mad contraption, bristling with bravado and black, sardonic wit.
But if the old-style auteur B-movie is more or less scorched earth at this point, there’s no one better equipped than Wheatley to inherit it.