Free Fire a 'Misfire' for A24

A24’s latest offering Free Fire had a dreadful opening weekend at the box office, netting less than $1 million domestically, a far cry from the $6-8 million it was projected.

Free Fire is set in 1978 Boston, and is an ensemble piece where a shootout erupts during a gun deal gone wrong. It’s billed as an action-comedy, but the laughs are few and far in between, and the action sequences aren’t particularly thrilling. It’s only an hour and a half, but even at that short of a length the movie feels like it drags out longer than it should have; I couldn’t wait for it to end.

Director Ben Wheatley had made several promising low-budget films prior to this, including 2011’s Kill List, which was a breathe of fresh air into the horror genre. It was a cerebral thriller that morphed into a psychological horror film full of fresh ideas.

With Free Fire, Wheatley unfortunately resorts back to genre-thrills, bringing nothing fresh to the table instead drawing from previous successful films and successful tricks done by other directors in the past.

Free Fire is Ben Wheatley desperately trying to be Quentin Tarantino, with this movie obviously inspired by Tarantino’s debut offering of Reservoir Dogs in 1992, but Free Fire isn’t nearly as clever, and Wheatley doesn’t have the same skills of writing dialogue or developing characters as Tarantino.

Free Fire does boast a talented cast, headed by Brie Larson and Armie Hammer. Armie Hammer in particular stands out with his charm and the occasional bit of clever dialogue, but otherwise this cast was wasted on a mess of a movie that isn’t quite sure what it wants to be.

Even the action sequences, which there are numerous of, are a complete mess because the visuals are so poorly done it’s hard to tell who is shooting at who. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe we aren’t supposed to be able to distinguish who is crawling through the dirt in the warehouse, or whose side who is on. No matter what, it doesn’t work nearly as well as intended.

You also don’t get emotionally invested in any of the characters, save for maybe Brie Larson’s Justine a little bit, because we get basically zero background information on any of the characters and see infinitesimal character development throughout.

We learn that Stevo is a bit of a sexual deviant and that Vernon was a misdiagnosed child-prodigy turned international asshole. That’s it. We learn the whole impetus for everything jumping off in the warehouse is due to a fight the previous evening between Steveo and Harry, where Harry clobbers Steveo because Stevo violated his cousin at a bar.

Keeping a movie afloat that has one single setting is a tough task, and Wheatley doesn’t seem up to the challenge here. You need strong dialogue and interesting characters, and there isn’t nearly enough of either to keep you glued to the screen for very long.

A24 has had a successful run of movies, if not monetarily successful, at least critically successful, but this feels like a step backwards.

Grade: C