Raised from a watery chamber resembling a womb, Henry, a full-grown man, looks out on the world as if for the first time. Viewers see Henry’s world through his own eyes (which is how all of “Hardcore Henry” is made), and his prospects seem circumscribed. Henry finds himself in a hospital-like setting; he’s unable to speak, and he’s missing an arm and a leg. In short order, however, a medical professional named Estelle (Haley Bennett) fits him with high-tech prostheses, which she snaps into place, attaches to his body, and covers with a coating of his own skin. Henry is also suffering from memory loss, and Estelle reminds him of one detail: they’re husband and wife.
When armed invaders breach the operating room, Henry discovers what Estelle already knew—that they’re someplace in the sky, inside an airplane—and husband and wife clamber through vents to reach a conveniently located escape pod. The pod jettisons them down to the middle of a highway in the vicinity of Moscow, where their newfound safety is quickly dispelled by the impact of an oncoming S.U.V. The action alone, at least early in the film, partakes of the inventive movie heroism of the ridiculous sublime, but unfortunately, like the escape pods themselves, the story has nowhere to go from those initial heights but down.
Because the cameras (mainly tiny GoPros) that record the action are affixed to a helmet-like mount at the level of Henry’s mouth, even the simplest of running strides is hyperkinetic. The violence that Henry deals and endures (and Henry is, throughout the film, played by a varied range of stunt specialists) has a jagged, flash-frame-like rapidity that quickly grows as familiar as an ache, and elicits not excitement or fascination but a distracted curiosity around the edges—as, for instance, in the fish-eye effect featured in almost every shot, which bends the firm verticals of walls and trees and lamp poles into ludicrously supple arcs.
But I digress. Henry, not just car-smashed but under armed assault at ground level, is rescued by the gruffly chipper Jimmy (Sharlto Copley), who puts him in a car, takes him for a ride, and discloses to him the cyborgian terms of survival. Henry needs a battery charge (he’s got a couple of sockets in his chest and Jimmy has a couple of plugs in his glove compartment), but new mayhem gets in the way. Henry, armed and possessed with superhuman strength and accuracy, copiously sheds the blood of the attackers and makes another escape.
Jimmy turns out to be a sort of shape-shifter (it’s the one plot device of admirable ingenuity), and his forms and styles lend the movie its one comic sidebar and antic diversion; Copley appears to be having a good time delivering the requisite mimicry. Meanwhile, there’s an evil mastermind behind these attacks—an affected, orotund blond beast named Akan (Danila Kozlovsky), whose unexplained telekinetic powers make for some brief touches of gestural majesty that hardly compensates for their gratuitousness. But then, gratuitous is this movie’s very stock in trade, and most of it relates to blood and sex.
Counting up the assailants that Henry and Jimmy dispatch to the beyond would be like counting flies in a slaughterhouse, and the movie depicts their deaths with a comparable indifference—usually with a bloody splat, except when some special grotesquery of a shattered brainpan or a hacked carotid proves unavoidable or irresistible. And since the movie is shot entirely from Henry’s point of view, it delivers the dubious delight of doing that killing while conveying virtually none of the danger that Henry himself faces—despite depicting the horde of assailants and even the shuddering force of their attacks. Even though, within the vague rules of the deadly game, Henry isn’t invulnerable, his rounds of mass mayhem are nearly zipless—pure, disinterested, mechanical fun, if that’s your idea of fun.
The curses and epithets fly throughout, but the worst that anyone (a man) reserves for anyone else (a man) is “pussy,” and the director, Ilya Naishuller, makes clear his fine opinion of womanhood throughout—not least, in a long, lurid, and ultimately gory sequence that takes place in a brothel, where he just happens to propel Henry into room after room of red-lit, pneumatic action featuring throngs of topless women servicing their male clients. When the gunplay starts, it gives the women just enough of a chance to run around in front of Henry as he makes his way back through the chambers, so that the display of flesh can be doubled in length.
Yet even this sideshow can’t top the ending, which I won’t spoil, although it’s pretty rotten in itself. Suffice it to say that, somewhere late in the film, there’s an act of violence by a man against a woman that plays onscreen like the kind of revenge that, the director seems to imagine, the movie’s male viewers have long dreamed of inflicting on the women in their lives or in their fantasies.
The movie is shot on location in Moscow, but there isn’t much of the city on view in the darting camera work. There are the subtlest hints of political dismay in glimpses of the casual corruption of the police, whether at a traffic stop, in a request for a light for a cigarette, or in a sexual attack on a woman—and, for that matter, in the casual anarchy of the story itself, a macabre series of mass killings that the authorities seem to have no awareness of and no ability to stop.
Some of the stunt work is remarkable—I’m thinking especially of a parkour scene that leads from a basement through a park to a bridge, as well as a highway car chase in which a motorcycle, with sidecar, is driven into, through, and out of a fast-moving van—but the movie’s hyperactive thrills are very quickly dispelled not merely by their quantity, by the numbing amount of stakes-free violence, and by the combatants’ monotonously undetailed and stultified world but, above all, by the absence of direction. That’s why the best moments in the film—the ones that capture some of the choreographic delights of stunt work and give the action a tinge of psychological resonance and personal implication—are those in which Henry isn’t a participant but a mere spectator, in which Jimmy does the fighting or, for that matter, does an unexpected bit of musical comedy. The rest of the time, the first-person perspective flattens and dulls the experience. There’s no “I” in its eye.
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