Free Fire Review

As Ben Wheatley's notoriety has risen, so too has the scale of his films. Hard to believe that Wheatley's feature debut was only 8 years a go, 2009's Down Terrace had a monumentally modest budget, with Wheatley quoting an initial budget as low as £6,000. Since then he has seen incremental rises which reached the dizzying heights of a £6million budget on last years Tom Hiddleston starring High Rise. This year sees the release of his starriest and most expensive film to date, Free Fire.



Set in a 70s Boston warehouse (actually filmed in Brighton, a stones throw from Wheatley's own home), Free Fire centres on an arms deal between some IRA affiliates and an eccentric South African arms dealer. After an altercation leads to flared tempers people start firing and bodies start dropping.


Setting the film entirely in one location and in relatively 'real' time is a stroke of genius on Wheatley's part, it really allows him and his DP Laurie Rose to explore every conceivable area of the dusty and derelict setting. Wheatley has spoken about how he sees the film as having two distinct worlds, the world where people are stood up shooting at each other and the world where people are lying down after being shot, those worlds do feel distinct which gives the film much more breadth than it might otherwise have had. Standing out above all other technical aspects is the sound design, it really is on another level here, when guns are shot they are loud, almost deafening, and when a character is shouting across a warehouse whilst people are shooting it isn't distinct, because why would it be? It's approached with logic and it also sounds awesome.

In the past Wheatley's films have tread a very fine line between what's funny and what's 'dark'. If Kill List was his most nihilistic work, then the jet black comedy of Sightseers would sit between that and Free Fire which is easily the most laugh out loud and fun film of his career so far. The wit is quick and twisted and perfectly written  for each character, written by Wheatley in conjunction with co-writer Amy Jump. There are many great one liners, the highlight of which may well be "I look like I tried to have sex with a reluctant panda bear". There is a great physical comedy to the action as well, Di Caprio got many plaudits for his flopping around in The Wolf of Wall Street, but the cast here must be praised for their physical devotion to their performances, just the seemingly simple thing of the consistency in their physical deterioration after the numerous injuries inflicted provides the film with some humorous images.

Much will be written about the cast Wheatley has assembled here, and thought it is considerably starrier than you'd come to expect from his previous works, whats great is just how perfectly cast they all are. Cillian Murphy and Michael Smiley are a great pairing, Murphy's Jack oozes a cool, cocksure charm and Michael Smiley's Frank is a grizzled curmudgeon with some brilliant one liners. Assisting Jack and Frank is Sam Riley's crack smoking idiot Stevo and his actually quite sweet friend Bernie played by Enzo Cilenti, Cilenti does good work with a character that has a lot less to do, Stevo on the other hand is the main source of comic relief in the film, he's actually quite an unlikable character but Riley manages to make him the right side of endearing. On the other side of the deal is Sharlto Copley's arms dealer Vern, Copley has a very unique on screen energy, which in the past when not sufficiently wrangled can be detrimental to a film. Fortunately here, the vain, pathetic nature of Vern's character is consistently hilarious, It's comfortably Copley's best performance since District 9. Vern's entourage comprised of Martin (Babou Ceesay), Gordon (Noah Taylor) and Harry (Jack Reynor) all give great performances, and their characters are all given enough by the script to be well formed people. The facilitators of the deal also happen to be the starriest names of the cast, and probably the two best characters in the film. Brien Larson is Justine, supposedly there representing the Irish side of the deal, she's the only woman of the piece and as the consistent big dick swinging goes on around her Larson's performance let's you know that she's tolerating it but something else is going on, she is definitely the smartest person in the room. Then there's Armie Hammer's Ord, there supposedly representing Vern but more likely he's there to just have fun. He is an exceptionally cool individual, like Vern he is exceedingly vain, pausing to check his reflection at one point, but unlike Vern he is incredibly efficient and when the shooting starts there's a sense that he is capable of killing everyone in the room and walking away with the money and whatever guns are left.

If there's a problem with the film it's that it sits awkwardly between two places. The peppy and humorous script lends itself to a more comic sense of violence to go with it. However as the film goes on it becomes more clear that what your watching is actually just people slowly dying from the gunshots they've sustained. There's only really two particularly grizzly deaths, it would have been nice to seen some more inventiveness in the way these characters meet their ends, not necessarily a Kill List  hammer to the head, but something other than another gunshot wound.

Though it features much of what we've come to like from Wheatley's work, it seems like a marked difference from his other work. This is perhaps his most accessible work to date hopefully meaning this will reach a bigger audience. Perhaps the greatest praise this film has received comes from the fact that Martin Scorsese is listed as an executive producer, a man who is immensely cine-literate and a master filmmaker himself, Armie Hammer has spoke of how Kill List and A Field in England blew his mind, with such praise from such people in such a relatively short space of time, the future looks very promising for Mr Wheatley.

(High 4 Stars)