Toronto International Film Festival Midnight Madness programmer Colin Geddes always picks something badass to kick off the festival with a bang, and this year it was Ben Wheatley’s FREE FIRE. It just won the Midnight Madess Grolsch People’s Choice Award.
This is a pretty crazy film. It is set in the 70s, and the entire film consists of a shady arms deal and the resulting shootout in an abandoned warehouse. It is the kind of thing you can imagine someone writing on a dare, or just to see if they can do it, but Ben Wheatley was crazy enough to try to pull it off. There are more than a dozen people as part of this deal, but some of the more famous are Brie Larson, Armie Hammer, Cillian Murphy, Sharlto Copley.
I’d give you more of the setup, but that is really all there is. There is about 30 minutes of lead-in and then about an hour long shootout. Oh and it is a comedy. There aren’t too many films in the extended comedy-shootout genre, but the closest lately is maybe SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS, which played at a previous TIFF.
A film like this lives or dies based on the characters. There are some wild ones here — just put Sharlto Copley in anything and he’s going to be memorable. Here he plays the jackass head of the team selling the guns. And Brie Larson is one of my favorite people working in movies today. She plays the woman who more or less put the deal together, and she seems to know people on both sides. I also really like Armie Hammer — he’s got that perfect amount of commanding charm, with just enough of a touch of sleaze to fit right into a 70s crime caper movie. Some of the other characters have enough of a backstory that you know right away that some of their prior misdeeds are going to get them into trouble when the shit hits the fan. And of course two groups of shady strangers meeting over an arms deal is just a perfect powder keg.
The setup of FREE FIRE is great. The shootout is mostly fun too — there’s plenty of opportunity for character development as everyone holes up and dodges bullets. And of course in the stress of such a situation, previous alliances start to fall apart, and it becomes not so clear which side some people are on. Some are just out for themselves. There's a certain amount of glee that comes with watching a dozen over the top 70s underworld characters all kill each other.
There are a couple of issues though. There are precious few establishing master shots so that we can get the geography of where everyone is during the shootout. The result is often confusing action. Also, things get a bit monotonous. There are long stretches of time where there is just repeated gunfire and nobody gets hit. They could have cut out 20 minutes of the gunfight and had a better movie. Of course then it would be at a feature length runtime.
But hey, FREE FIRE is an experiment. It isn’t 100% successful, but it is fun. And I’d rather have inventiveness in cinema that just the same old thing any day. Free fire comes out at the end of March in the UK. I'm not sure if it has a US release date.
