THE BRITISH filmmaker Ben Wheatley has made his those-who-can’t views on critics well known in interviews, so far be it from him to openly court us in his work.
Yet there are moments when Free Fire, his sixth feature film, feels like it’s been made with certain banally exuberant poster quotes specifically in mind. Wheatley’s banging, clattering heist thriller invites critics to write lines like: “Comes in with all guns blazing!”—and many have duly obliged.
Except when it comes to Free Fire, that’s not so much a hackneyed endorsement as a neutral statement of fact: The gunfire begins all but immediately, and on the slimmest of pretexts. Twenty minutes in, when enough bullets had been sprayed and expletives spewed to fill an average Tarantino movie, my date turned to me and said, with a faint note of desperation, “Oh God, it’s just this for another hour, isn’t it?” He was 10 minutes short of the mark, but otherwise: Yep.
This story is from the April 28 2017 edition of Newsweek.
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This story is from the April 28 2017 edition of Newsweek.
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