‘Free Fire’ hits mark with gritty fun
A throwback to the earlier work of the film’s co-executive producer Martin Scorsese, “Free Fire” is English auteur Ben Wheatley’s first American-based film.
A gritty, period, semi-comic crime drama, “Free Fire” is set in 1978 Boston (although hard to tell exactly from the film) in an abandoned factory, where mid-level criminals, including an IRA gun runner named Chris (Cillian Murphy), meet to exchange assault rifles for cold cash. Among the players on opposite teams are the alluring, tough cookie Justine (Academy Award winner Brie Larson), Boston Irish mobster Frank (Michael Smiley), whose wastrel nephew Stevo (Sam Riley), a junkie, causes all hell to break loose when he accidentally runs into Harry (Jack Reynor), a beardo driver for the gun-selling opposing team, who beat Stevo to a pulp the night before in a bar.
The gun-selling team is headed by sharp-dresser dandy Vernon (Sharlto Copley), a South African arms dealer whose partner in crime is former Black Panther Martin (Babou Ceesay, “Eye in the Sky”). The two teams are brought together by the tall, bearded swell named Ord (Armie Hammer). Everyone is armed and dangerous.
The trouble, which was due to begin, starts when Chris observes that he had asked for M-16s, but that Vernon has arrived bearing AR70s. When Harry spies Stevo hiding in the shadows, things go from proverbial bad to worse, especially after Harry pulls a revolver and shoots Stevo. Soon, everyone ducks behind low cover and fires at one another with a variety of handguns.
Staged inside an enclosed space for the most part, “Free Fire” is a variation on a theme of John Carpenter’s 1970s-era grind house landmark “Assault on Precinct 13” with a grungy, “Mean Streets,” rawboned feel and some truly Scorsese-like moments of gang-movie ultra-violence.
But Wheatley, whose breakout film “Down Terrace,” was set and shot in eight days in his seaside hometown of Brighton, England, where “Free Fire” was also shot, doesn’t really adapt to his Beantown setting in any meaningful way. “Free Fire” is not “The Departed” or “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” to be sure, although “Coyle” was also the work of a Brit director — the great Peter Yates (“Bullitt”).
But Vernon’s reference to Pandora’s box is certainly apt, and in one memorable moment, the sellers arrive in a beat-up red van with John Denver’s gloriously sappy “Annie’s Song” blaring on the tape deck (we also get delicious licks of King Crimson). Later, someone will raise his head to note, Monty Python-style, that he is “not dead.” You can practically smell the gunpowder, pot smoke, vaporized skag and Hai Karate. Co-written by Wheatley and his writing partner Amy Jump, “Free Fire” lacks authenticity. But, while it may be an imitation of an imitation, it’s also a lot of grungy fun.
(“Free Fire” contains ultragun violence, profanity, lewd language and drug use.)