For folks who are too lazy to play their own video games, there’s the movie Hardcore. For 90 minutes, first-time feature director Ilya Naishuller throttles your central nervous system with a stretched-out spasm of first-person action. Run here, jump there, slice this carotid artery, shatter that skull. The plot, what little of it there is, has mute amnesia victim Henry (ostensibly “you”), avoiding death at every turn and frantically racing to a series of checkpoints delivered to his phone by a reappearing guide in the form of a manic (and homophobic) Sharlto Copley.
From an acrobatic point of view, all the GoPro choreography is impressive. “How’d they do THAT?” you’ll wonder for the first 15 minutes. But as the relentless shaky-cam and ear-splitting weapons blasts soldier on, this query changes to: “Do I have any aspirin in my bag?” Hardcore taps into a 14-year-old boy’s brain, marinating in a vat of Mountain Dew, fantasising about high-energy kills, lusty women and loud music. Perhaps interesting for sociological study, but as a movie, it is vulgar, boring and embarrassing.
After a perplexing prologue that never gets explained, we’re woken up RoboCop style. Parts of our body are synthetic, and a gorgeous woman claiming to be our wife (Haley Bennett) is stitching us together. But then, an albino with telekinetic powers (Danila Kozlovsky) and his goons come in and destroy the lab. Turns out we’re in some sort of airship, and a cool dive in an escape pod takes us to a Russian city. That’s when our guide (Sharlto Copley in a collection of guises) appears to send us on a number of gruesome missions. Eventually this leads to a second fight against the albino, who is creating a race of super soldiers.
The opening chapters consist of leaping and climbing, but this eventually leads to repeated grotesque dismemberment. Naked women cower in fear as our guns blast up a nightclub. We leap down stairwells, dive through windows, bash our way through traffic like a pinball.
There is, admittedly, a straight shot of pure cinema that charges some of these sequences. Many of the visual gags are clever. (A grenade is thrown down a flight of stairs, bodies rise and fall, tossed like pizza dough.) But even a movie like Crank takes time off for story and characterization. Naishuller’s technique is one that could be well served as a shorter gimmick; a solitary action scene in a larger film. Hardcore is unrelenting and unforgiving in its commitment to be loud, fast, destructive and gross.
As my mind wandered (because it’s impossible to pay attention to this for too long), I wondered if this bombardment to the lizard part of my brain was unhealthy. When the image on the screen is “you”, and “you” are violently killing people with guns and knives at close range, it eventually becomes a transgressive act – particularly when it fails to be in the service of any story.
Hardcore is produced by Timur Bekmanbetov, whose own movies (Night Watch, Wanted) have a striking visual look but are similarly muddled. Ilya Naishuller was courted after a violent first-person music video he shot for his band went viral. That impressive five-minute video is an apt indicator for what the full 90 minutes of Hardcore are like. If this is the birth of le Cinema du Xbox, I guess that makes me the kid who prefers to play board games.
