Review of Free Fire (2017) by João Miguel R — 12 Jul 2017

When a movie or episode comes to us in the "bottle" form, it is designed to let the actors riff off each other over the course of the allotted time while saving some money for the studio in the process. While I love a good bottle movie (See Hateful 8, Moon or even the Breakfast Club), sometimes it requires better story telling from the director and writers than a traditional movie due to locking yourself in a tight space where the actors can't just be the only thing to carry a movie past average.

For Free Fire, the cast is certainly up to the task with the likes of Brie Larson, Shartlo Copley, Cillian Murphy and Armie Hammer just to name a few, but even the 85-minute run time leaves us in a warehouse too long with the premise and overall story missing the mark about as many times as these characters miss with their bullets.

It's designed as a shoot-em up with a simple premise behind why things pop off. Though director Ben Wheatley is known for dark humor (Sightseers) or action bordering on horror (Kill List), he has trouble combining the two successfully. We either get stalled moments with silly dialogue (granted it is funny) from Copley's character without much else going on or we get mindless shooting in varied directions. I mean, it took me a solid 20 minutes into the movie to finally understand who was on who's side after the gunfire starts. Wheatley does his best to try and pair off different actors with each other throughout the movie to switch up dialogue patterns and outcomes, but it takes so long getting to each new pairing watching someone crawl army style on the ground for what feels like 5 minutes that I wish I could have fast forwarded to the interactions to bypass the transitions.

But...having said the bulk of what is wrong with the film, it was still enjoyable enough to watch the actors have as much fun as it seemed they did. It's just a shame the movie never digs itself out of an average rush squarely focused on delivering adrenaline one bullet at a time...even if it takes 100 bullets to get there.