The restlessly inventive director Ben Wheatley gives us the crime-thriller equivalent of a violently atonal jazz suite lasting an hour and a half, like a Sam Peckinpah movie storyboarded by Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra. Gunshots here are as frequent, numerous and noisy as an avant garde drumroll. The film turns out to be plotless, formless, shapeless, McGuffinless, directionless and ruthless, but it is dazzlingly well put together, with some lethal zingers amid the gunfire and a droll use of John Denver on the soundtrack – alluding subtextually, I suspect, to the urban myth about Denver’s war service in Vietnam.
It’s supremely stylish and smart, and the melee becomes so disorientating that you forget, almost, that the whole thing is taking place in just the one place. In some ways it resembles a stage-play production of Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, like the one that Michael Fassbender was said to have mounted in his student days: although if Tarantino were to rewrite this, he would slice in some alarming flashbacks exposing fissures of personal history and bad faith. Some have declared themselves impatient or exasperated with the sheer non-narrative relentlessness of Free Fire. But that is part of the point and the joke, if not exactly the charm. As in their brilliant adaptation of JG Ballard’s High-Rise, Wheatley and his co-writer, Amy Jump, have unilaterally declared their own kind of independence from an expected mode of storytelling.
Free Fire is about an arms deal in a 1970s Boston warehouse: IRA hard men Chris and Frank (played by Cillian Murphy and Michael Smiley) show up to buy a truckload of automatic weapons from Vernon (Sharlto Copley), an emotionally unstable entrepreneur from Rhodesia, as it was then called – a man who has never recovered emotionally from the early trauma of being incorrectly hailed as a child genius, and with an irritating habit of punningly using his name to illustrate what he regards as teachable opportunities in the gun-running business: “Watch and Vern!” He is with his ex-Panther associate Martin (Babou Ceesay) and his cordial-yet-sinister American intermediary Ord (Armie Hammer). Justine (Brie Larson) is the enigmatic woman who has set the deal up for the Irish contingent, and who turns out to have been underestimated by one and all.
But a personal quarrel between other, lowest-ranking players tips the whole thing into anarchy. Like those tough guys in Reservoir Dogs ready to squabble like kids over who gets to be called Mr Black, these people’s paranoia, machismo and inability to forget a slight utterly destroy it all. The mayhem swallows everything like plankton in a whale. It is as if the final shootout in a gangster movie, or war film, or western had metastised backwards to fill the entire movie. There is a kind of pure hilarious effrontery in the way Free Fire simply protracts the gruesome catastrophe. This is what the story is.
Wheatley says he was inspired by an FBI report of a case in Miami and, although he’s not on oath with that, and as stylised as Free Fire certainly is as fiction, it has in its satirical way something to say about plot and violent crime in both the real and unreal worlds. The non-plot of Free Fire is preposterous, but perhaps Jump and Wheatley are asking: is it any more preposterous than the tricksily elaborate made-up plot of any standard-issue actioner? Plot is pretext: Chandler and Godard have in different ways talked about the expediency of a girl and a gun, or getting someone to come through the door with a gun in his hand. As for the real world, plot may be a quaint misconception. Motive, planning, strategy and a rational assessment of vested interest, all of the things that are vital for the construction of narrative, may simply not be as important as we thought.
Crime, certainly as it is experienced by those who have to police it, is often vicious and violent disorder initiated by people who are not sufficiently intelligent to see on which side their bread is buttered. Tom Wolfe said we have a romantic view of criminals as people who know what they want and are prepared to risk going outside the law to get it. In reality, they are people who get into a horrible, bad-tempered, worsening mess. Free Fire has a kind of ironic fidelity to this view. There is a cheerful audacity and insolence to Wheatley’s spray of bullets. And these people are anything but free.
