Sharlto Copley – Movie Musings

The calm before the storm in Ben Wheatley’s gun-fight Free Fire

Director: Ben Wheatley

Cast: Sharlto Copley (Vernon), Armie Hammer (Ord), Brie Larsen (Justine), Cillian Murphy (Chris), Jack Reynor (Harry), Babou Ceesay (Martin), Enzo Cilenti (Bernie), Sam Riley (Stevo), Michael Smiley (Frank), Noah Taylor (Gordon), Patrick Bergin (Howie)

At some unspecified point in the late 1970s, IRA men Chris (Cillian Murphy) and Frank (Michael Smiley) meet with Vernon (Sharlto Copley), via an intermediary Justine (Brie Larsen), to buy a lot of guns in an abandoned New York warehouse. Unfortunately, Frank’s druggy brother-in-law Stevo (Sam Riley) the night before was badly beaten by one of Vernon’s men Harry (Jack Reynor), after Stevo had maimed Harry’s cousin. Next thing anyone knows, guns are drawn and the shooting starts…

And that shooting lasts for the course of the rest of the film. Free Fire is like some sort of slightly odd concept album. As if Wheatley and co-screenwriter Amy Jump sat down and wondered “can we make a gunfight that basically lasts the entire course of a film”? The answer was, as it turns out, yes they could. Was it actually a good idea? Well that’s less clear.

The good stuff first. The film looks terrific, and is very well shot. The mix of beige and slightly over-saturated colours capture a hilariously flashy look at the 1970s. Soundtrack choices are very well made. The sound design – surely the main focus of any film focused on gunfights – is excellent, with bullets sounding like they are ricocheting past your ear. It’s cut with intelligence and clarity – it’s always immediately clear where you are and where everyone else is (Wheatley even patiently films our characters entering the warehouse through a series of doors – and old trick but it immediately gives us the geography).

The screenplay is also pretty funny in places, and does a good job of sketching out characters incredibly quickly. It’s lucky it also has a fine cast of actors to inhabit these swiftly drawn characters. Best in show is probably Armie Hammer as a suave, cock-sure hired gun who clearly believes the whole shebang is a little beneath him. Cillian Murphy as the nominal lead makes an engaging double act with Michael Smiley. Sharlto Copley adds maverick, overblown colour as a cocky weapons dealer. Brie Larson plays the long game as the intermediary whose loyalties seem a little unclear. Sam Riley is engrossingly pathetic as the whining loser whose actions lead to the whole disaster.

The gun fight itself is a neat combination of the realistic and the comic book. Our heroes are hilariously inaccurate with their weapons (as you expect most people would be in this situation) but this doesn’t stop every single character getting shot in the arms, legs and other body parts multiple times. Adrenalin means they largely shrug these off for the first half hour of the film, but by the final third each character is unable to walk and visibly struggling with growing shock and loss of blood. I’ll admit it’s rather fun to see a gunfight conducted largely by people crawling around on the floor groaning, in between whining and complaining at each other.

Structurally there isn’t a lot to the film. There is a twist of sorts as both sides are double crossed (the identity of the double crossers should be worked out by most astute watchers) and the film occasionally throws enemies together in odd partnerships and alliances. But the plot is basically a real-life survival film – who is going to get out of this warehouse alive?

Which is what brings us back to this concept album idea. Yes this an entertaining enough film – and it’s very short – but is a single gun fight between characters we’ve only vaguely got to know in the opening 10 minutes really enough to sustain long term interest? Is this something I can imagine re-watching? It’s got some funny lines and some decent moments, but honestly no not really. It’s an inventive idea, like a challenge Wheatley has set himself. But instead of seeing what is clearly a talented director playing with toys and seeing if he can make a film centred solely around an action set-piece, imagine if he turned that creative fuel on making an actual film. We know he can – he’s got some fine material on his resume. So why make this?

Free Fire feels like a conscious attempt at making a cult film, with its 1970s aesthetic, its eclectic cast of characters, its witty moments and punchy action sequences. I’ll agree it’s very different from anything else I’ve seen. Does that necessarily mean that it’s a good film? I’m not sure. It’s a challenge and almost a joke. It’s different from action scenes in Hollywood blockbusters – but at the end of the day, for all the fact that the gun shots have consequence, it’s just an extended action set-piece without context. Very entertaining but kind of empty.

Matt Damon takes aim. He’s wearing as well a mechanical suit that makes him look like a building under construction.

Director: Neill Blomkamp

Cast: Matt Damon (Max Da Costa), Jodie Foster (Defence Secretary Delacourt), Alice Braga (Frey Santiago), Sharlto Copley (Agent Kruger), Diego Luna (Julio), Wagner Moura (Spider), William Fichtner (John Carlyle)

In a dystopian future, the world has become polluted and overpopulated. The rich and privileged live on Elysium, a massive orbital space station with an Earth-like atmosphere where medical equipment can cure anything. The masses on Earth yearn to join Elysium, many resorting to black market routes. Max da Costa (Matt Damon) is an ex-thief who contracts a lethal radiation infection at work. With little choice, he agrees to take part in a dangerous data heist (wearing a suit that enhances his physical abilities) in return for a black market trip to Elysium. But his heist crosses the plans of Elysium’s ambitious Defence Secretary (Jodie Foster) and her ruthless black ops operative Kruger (Sharlto Copley).

The design of this world, as per District 9 (to which this feels almost like a spiritual sequel), is impressive and really captures the visual clash between third world poverty on Earth and the paradise in the sky of Elysium. The sense of a society firmly divided into the haves and have nots is (at first) very well sketched out. There is the potential for a compelling us-against-them narrative ready to burst out, and Damon’s character seems positioned as “our champion” to bring down the system.

This is actually a really neat concept for a movie. What it’s crying out for, though, is more than the by-the-numbers execution it gets here. I suspect there were struggles between Blomkamp’s interest in putting social issues side-by-side with sci-fi action, and the demands of “the money” to get more Damon Bourne-inspired chaos on the screen. Either way, after the initial set-up the movie goes nowhere in particular. A lot of world establishment is needed here (I’ve just struggled to explain it in one paragraph) and the film doesn’t get the balance right between setting this up and then getting into the story – it’s a good 45 minutes before the story starts and 40 minutes later the film is more or less over. I’ll give it credit that the short runtime does mean it goes nowhere fast, but it’s still a pointless destination.

Anyway, the problem that cuts to the core is you don’t really care about anything. Copley brings charisma to his heavy role, but the character is a formless one who engages in any act of villainy the film needs him to do. Foster’s cold (English accented?) bureaucrat similarly never fully comes to life, despite her best efforts. Braga is a thinly sketched bit of human interest. The film is crammed with decent actors who were obviously attracted to some sort of idea behind the script – it’s just a shame that whatever got them worked up about the material never made it to the screen.

Damon’s character is key to this: he should be someone who finds his feet as the champion of the oppressed, who makes decisions and sacrifices that initially at first seem to be out the scope of his understanding of the world. The script pushes him towards this but it never feels real – we never get to know him (either before or after the event that changes his life) and we never get a sense of him being driven by anything beyond his original narrow aims until the film suddenly calls on him to make a series of huge sacrifices. It just doesn’t feel true: the film doesn’t take us on a journey with him, meaning the end lacks satisfaction. I’ll also mention in passing that, among the poor, downtrodden, entirely-Latino urban classes, the lead is the only white character – and yet he too has a Latino name, which to me suggests a certain level of white-washing for box office.

Instead this is a poorly sketched out bit of faux-thinking sci-fi, that sketches out a dystopia that never really makes any sense (it seems easy to cure the population of the world, but the inhabitants of Elysium never do – surely some sort of reason other than apathy might have added a bit more believability to this? Perhaps if more had been made of the need to depopulate the Earth?). Instead it’s a crapsack world for the sake of it, and the characters move through a series of events that happen but never engage us.

It’s sad, as this could have been quite a little B-movie classic. Perhaps the best review of the film comes from Blomkamp himself: “I feel like I fucked it up, I feel like ultimately the story is not the right story. I still think the satirical idea of a ring, filled with rich people, hovering above the impoverished Earth, is an awesome idea. I love it so much, I almost want to go back and do it correctly. But I just think the script wasn’t… I just didn’t make a good enough film is ultimately what it is. I feel like I executed all of the stuff that could be executed, like costume and set design and special effects very well. But, ultimately, it was all resting on a somewhat not totally formed skeletal system, so the script just wasn’t there; the story wasn’t fully there.”

Couldn’t put it better myself.