Review of Hardcore Henry (2015) by Patrick L — 17 Aug 2016

"Hardcore Henry wore me down relentlessly with it's sheer insanity and non-stop grisly violence".

DVD Movie Review: Hardcore Henry.

Date Viewed: July 12 2016.

Written and Directed By Ilya Naishuller.

Starring: Sharlto Copley, Danila Kozlovsky,.

Haley Bennett, Andrei Dementiev, Ilya Naishuller, Dasha Charusha, Tim Roth, Will Stewart, Svetlana Ustinova and Sergey Valyaev.

What a nauseating and radioactively bad movie this is. "Hardcore Henry" is not the name of a porno flick, it's an action movie that's told from a first person perspective, to put it in another way, it's like playing a video game and watching a movie at the same time. The first person concept has never been tried before and I hope it's the last time Hollywood uses it because this movie is incompetently made and insanely violent. When I first saw the trailer, it looked kind of cool, then I saw the movie and boy was I wrong.

"Hardcore Henry" also has the distinction of being filmed with GoPro cameras and as you can imagine, the editing is messy and sometimes you can't tell who's shooting at who. If you took three drinks of vodka and play "Hitman" for two hours, it would pretty much look like "Hardcore Henry". The movie is set in the near future where it centers around a man who wakes up inside a laboratory. He doesn't remember his name but the female scientist who woke him up knows him because she's his wife. Scientist Estelle (Haley Bennett) tells the man his name is Henry and he was part of an accident that left him amnesiac and mute.

Suddenly, a group of mercenaries led by a telekinetic freakshow named Akan (Danila Kozlovsky) storm the ship and attempt to kill Henry but he and Estelle flee the ship in an escape pod and they crash on a Moscow highway. Shortly after, Estelle gets taken by the mercenaries and they leave Henry for dead.

Eventually, Henry gets back on his feet and he teams up with a mysterious, chatty British guy named Jimmy (Sharlto Copley, of "District 9") who may or not be on your side. Everybody in the world wants Henry dead and strangely Jimmy keeps on getting brutally killed and somehow manages to come back to life. The apparent reason why Jimmy keeps coming back from the dead is that all the Jimmys who Henry hooked up with are actually clones the real Jimmy made in his laboratory. Jimmy is also a shape-shifter who appears in various roles such as a pot-smoking hippie, a punk rocker, a gruff sniper and WWII corporal.

Meanwhile, the bad guy's plan is to build an army of cyborg super-soldiers like Henry and use them to take over the world. Come on, do you have an evil plan that isn't cliched.

Another fine actor also stuck in this shit-heap is Tim Roth who plays Henry's father in a few flashback sequences. In the intro of this movie, we see a group of school bullies throwing a toy robot head into the wall and breaking it and Henry's dad encourages his son to fight back against the bullies and quit being a pussy. BRAVO! What great parenting from Tim Roth!

"Hardcore Henry" wore me down relentlessly with it's sheer insanity and non-stop grisly violence. Writer and director Ilya Naishuller has intriguing ideas here but the women here are presented as either sluts, prostitutes or bitches and Sharlto Copley who's a fine actor goes way over the top with his insanely bad performance. Sorry for the language in this review but can you believe how stupid this movie is?

Headache-inducing and rapidly punishing, "Hardcore Henry" is a computer-game movie with no controls or an exit button.