Free Fire is a disaster, intentionally. Ben Wheatley’s seventh film only features a few ingredients: a great cast, a derelict warehouse, and an uncountable amount of bullets. That mixture results in something like a stage play written for people who have grown up on a diet of video game shooters. Like Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, Free Fire takes a single setting with a motley cast of characters and throws a Molotov cocktail atop them. Wheatley’s film, released a year after The Hateful Eight, prefers an exponentially large cavalcade of bullets to the Agatha Christie slow burn of Tarantino’s picture. Once the first bullet fires, the rest follow quickly. Tarantino’s social and philosophical milieu – namely, race relations in the post-Civil War United States – contrasts sharply with Free Fire, whose only philosophical interest is to show just how destructive guns are. Wheatley and his cast have one job to do: point, shoot.
Things start off unassumingly, and illegally, for the folks of Free Fire. Ord (Armie Hammer) and Justine (Brie Larson, criminally underutilized) meet with a group of IRA members (Cillian Murphy, Michael Smiley, Enzo Cilenti, Sam Riley) to help broker an arms deal with the wisecracking South African gunrunner Vernon (Sharlto Copley). After a few steely gazes and half-clever quips, the deal is made in spite of a few hitches, such as Vernon’s failure to bring the right guns to the deal. The mood is slightly tense, but the guns get packed into the IRA van, and the money changes hands. Free Fire would have amounted to nothing but a slightly uncomfortable gun buy were it not for one fateful coincidence. Stevo (Riley) tells Bernie (Cilenti) that one of Vernon’s henchmen, Harry (Jack Reynor), beat him up at a bar the previous night. Harry then reveals that Stevo raped his cousin, which is why he beat him up. Both sides of the gun deal try for a patchwork reconciliation, but Harry chooses the only reconciliation Free Fire knows: a bullet. He shoots Stevo in the shoulder, in the process kick-starting the orchestra of gunfire that makes up the bulk of Free Fire‘s 90 minutes.
The success of Free Fire will depend on how one takes it. As a no-frills genre exercise, it’s pretty fun, and eventually quite funny. Were Wheatley to have stretched the story – such as it is – out for one minute longer than 90 minutes, the film would have dragged out its endless gunplay well beyond its welcome. With each round of gunfire, the absurdity of the whole situation grows even further. None of the IRA members defend Stevo’s actions, and all on both sides are uniformly of the opinion that he deserves a lot more than being reprimanded for his unconscionable act against Harry’s cousin. (Though Stevo seems to get away for a good chunk of the film, Wheatley and co-writer Amy Jump reserve the grisliest death for Stevo.) Yet the gunshot to the shoulder, which most of the characters seem to think Stevo deserved, starts a chain reaction of he shot, she shot that obfuscates the two sides of the arms deal. “I forgot whose side I’m on!” a voice shouts off-screen in the middle of the film, in between exchanges of bullets. The events of Free Fire start off with two sides, but ends with the doctrine of every man (and, in Larson’s case, woman) for himself. Confusion is Free Fire‘s comedy.
As anything beyond an entertaining display of entropy, however, Free Fire runs thin on substance. The characters here aren’t so much people as they are vehicles for gunfire and banter. Hammer exudes confidence and suave, despite being dressed as a psychology professor. Copley, given an entirely unsympathetic character, hams it up all the while sporting the most extreme fashion of the film’s 1970s setting. As the stoic IRA member Chris, Murphy amounts to little more than serviceable due to the thin writing he’s given. Both he and Copley’s characters give some intriguing political subtext to the otherwise insular Free Fire. Chris, buying guns for the IRA in the middle of the Troubles, ends up dealing with Vernon, who hails from the now defunct Republic of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), a country fraught with racial tension. There are undoubtedly interesting things to say about those two worlds coming together, but Free Fire cares little for politics. For Wheatley and Jump’s script, it’s enough that one bullet begets another.
This isn’t to say that films like Free Fire require robust political intrigue to be entertaining. The sharp 1970s costuming, charming cast, and merciless black humor add up to more than a few memorable moments in this zippy picture. And the utter destitution and futility faced by the characters of this film sends at least one key message: guns are only good for the two purposes for which they were invented: death and destruction. But this reading of Free Fire as a pacifist film is primarily superficial. Any attempt the movie makes to deviate beyond the ping-pong of gunfire – such as in the Pulp Fiction glowing suitcase device of the ringing phone in the warehouse’s office – ultimately crawls into a dead end, after which the bodies continue to hit the floor. The disappointment of Free Fire is not that it isn’t entertaining; it’s that its entertainment hints at something more substantial that isn’t delivered. The hailstorm of gunshots in Free Fire obscures all, including all that’s going on underneath the firefight.
Free Fire is available now on Blu-ray. Check out our review from SXSW.
