I had heard some pretty good things about HARDCORE going in -- that it was an entirely first-person action film, and that it was insane. Of course it helps that it had been scheduled into the coveted first Saturday night Midnight Madness slot at TIFF. I've been going to Midnight Madness at the Toronto Film Festival for over a decade, and there is no better crowd to see a crazy action or genre film with.
I wasn't disappointed! HARDCORE is spectacular balls-out action. I've never seen anything like it. I'm just blown away. It has extraordinary stunts, an astronomical body count, a series of wonderfully nutso performances by Sharlto Copley, and a pretty cool science fiction plot that is slowly revealed to the audience and the main character simultaneously. HARDCORE is highly experimental -- not everything works, but there are tons of things that not only work, they just explode onto the screen and fill you with glee.
As the film begins, we are seeing through the main character, Henry's eyes. After a childhood flashback (also in first person), we see a woman attaching a cybernetic arm and leg to him. She explains that she's his wife, and he's been in a coma, and has no memories. Before Henry's reconstruction is finished, a man bursts in and starts telekinetically destroying people. Henry and the woman have to escape (turns out they are in some kind of flying fortress), and then go on the run. They are being pursued by an army of thousands, but surprise, surprise, Henry is a semirobotic killing machine. Sharlto Copley keeps showing up trying to help Henry, only to get brutally killed in some ridiculous fashion, but then show up a few minutes later as a different character. This movie is a lot like CRANK, only if it were science fiction, shot entirely from a first person perspective, and about five times as nuts.
It is a tradition at BUTT-NUMB-A-THON to show the trailer for STUNT ROCK to kick off every year, because it is just a series of bad-ass stunts. One year they played the whole film though, and it was kind of boring -- all the best stuff was in the trailer, and the story blew. Well I'm hear to tell you -- HARDCORE makes STUNT ROCK look like SESAME STREET. It fulfills the fever dream of the STUNT ROCK rock trailer, if it were made with all the filmmaking advances of 2015, and powered by a mountain of cocaine. It is an entire movie of stunts more spectacular that those that could be achieved in the 70s, with about a thousand times the violence, and a story that doesn't suck.
To give you just a favor of some of the insanity: we see hand to hand combat, gunplay, car chases, flamethrowers, a motorcycle with a gatling gun, people falling from all manner of distances, explosions galore, sniper battles, and at least a few telekinetic showdowns. And you get to see Sharlto Copley play a good dozen characters. My favorite? Remember Alfred Molina's underwear-and-robe wearing, shotgun-weilding drug dealer character in BOOGIE NIGHTS? Sharlto Copley plays a version of that guy with a face full of cocaine in the midst of a giant strip club battle.
I've got to hand it to director Ilya Naishuller. In his first feature, he's done something almost unheard-of -- taken what could be a gimmick, and turned it into something fresh and innovative, and indeed something I've never seen before. The film is based on his short BITING ELBOWS: BAD MOTHERFUCKER. So I guess he had done a proof of concept, and was able to obtain some amount of financing based on that. I have no idea how much. The movie looks like it cost $300 million, though I'm sure it actually only had a minuscule fraction of that. The production values are through the roof though.
The soundtrack is pretty bad-ass too. And the opening credits. Oh my god. It is like a James Bond opening credits scene dreamed up by a madman genius.
This is the kind of film that you watch once all the way through (with glee), and then put on at a party in the background. It just sets a tone, and will make all your friends constantly spit out their drinks and say, "Did you see that? What the fuck?"
HARDCORE it isn't for everyone though. After the screening, one of my friends said it was like going to you friend's house and watching him play video games for two hours, where it was always set to the boss level. He's not entirely wrong with that quip, but imagine the best possible version of that you can, and you aren't even close. Hey, hardcore things aren't for everyone. But people who like it tend to love it. And this film earned the name.
