Two recent action flicks barely made an impression on me. I doubt I'll remember either of them in five years or so. Antoine Fuqua's remake of The Magnificent Seven is lackluster. I'm not that big a fan of John Sturges' 1960 film, especially compared to The Seven Samurai. The choreographed mayhem is by the numbers and the cartoon villainy of Peter Sarsgaard and his minions is unintentionally risible. The only one of the "7" to stand out is Ethan Hawke doing a PTSD update of Val Kilmer's Doc Holliday. Fuqua has done two good films with Denzel Washington (Training Day and The Equalizer), but the rest is dross.
Ben Wheatley's Free Fire came and went in theaters in a blink. Neither critics or audiences were enthused. Still, I found it to be a marginally better action flick than The Magnificent Seven. Critics have a point about the one dimensional nature of this shoot-'em-up in which the cast spend most of the film blowing each other away in an abandoned factory. The archetypal nature of this film allows Wheatley to riff on the genre as if he were a jazz musician messing around with a chord progression. Indeed, the score by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury seem to play with this notion. Wheatley's style is equally self knowing and dynamic. The thematic underpinning of the film, however, is a muffin made of nothing.
I must admit I got a frisson of pleasure from watching talented thesps like Brie Larson and Cillian Murphy crawling through the ooze and dusty detritus of this ninety minute acting exercise. Armie Hammer wins the acting honors and erases the aftertaste of The Lone Ranger by embodying the drollest of the film's villains. At its best, Free Fire reminds me of middling Walter Hill films like Trespass, The Driver, and Extreme Prejudice, but only at its best. At its worst, the film feels like a Reservoir Dogs knock off. (7/31/17)
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