Free Fire is a new action film that’s pretty much a genre experiment more than it is a movie. Basically it’s a 70’s era crime action flick that takes place in one location and is mostly a 45-50 minute gun fight / shoot out. An interesting experiment and ripe for some of the good old ultra-violence.
But, no, the move is an utter abject failure. A disaster of bad ideas poor implemented.
The basic premise – an arms deal goes bad. People shoot at each other.
First off, the movie is dark, grimy and set in the 70s with very limited character setup or personality. So you are watching a dark image with ill-defined characters shooting at each other… do you root for guy-with-seventies-mustache, guy-with-seventies-mustache, guy-with-seventies-mustache, or guy-with-seventies-mustache? Or maybe guy-with-beard or guy-with-beard. Oh, hey, guy with long hair, black guy, and white lady are in this too. Oh, black guy went down quick.
And the answer of who to roof for is… nobody. There isn’t a single character to like or even hate… there are no heroes or guys-so-bad-they’re-good… it’s just a bunch of criminals who sometimes make witty comments while shooting at each other. They have no back story and maybe thirty seconds of introduction, if the actor is lucky. So if you don’t care who lives or dies, who can you care or root for?
But, that’s ok, because each character takes about six shots to their legs and arms and shoulders and keep on shooting… mainly on the ground, groaning in pain but otherwise doin’ alright. Hey, people take shots in movies all the time and keep going… but not at this volume.
The other crime the movie makes is setting it in an abandoned factory without setting up the environment. So the flick devolves into guys behind concrete shooting at other guys behind concrete and you never know where anyone is in relation to each other. A good director would have given you a walk-through of dynamic locations so we understand the interior or had one group fighting behind parked cars and the other in offices or behind boxes. Something – anything – to give us a lead on where people are at any given time.
The movie just fails on everything it does… and even if you don’t mind personality-free characters and muddled locations as long as the gun fights are cool, even those really aren’t. Not for 45 minutes… there’s so little variety in anything anyone does… mostly just dudes shooting at dudes with handguns. And when things get more personal, you can’t really tell what in hell is going on (shaky cam close ups).
This movie is an interesting idea told so very, very poorly I’m shocked it’s actually getting decent reviews. Well, 66% on Rotten Tomatoes isn’t great but it’s much better than this turkey deserves. Skip it.
Score: 56