FREE FIRE Revisited: Brilliant Shootout with Guns and Words

The initial concept of Free Fire is simple – a deal between two groups has gone wrong, as a result of which both crews want to kill each other. The action takes place almost entirely in a large hall of an old factory. The characters, meanwhile, are armed both with firearms and with extremely sharp humor. Both hit the mark without missing.

After the excess-filled and audiovisual madness of High-Rise, Ben Wheatley opted for lunacy combining the style of the early works of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. The very first scenes reveal inspirations drawn from postmodern gangster cinema – rapid-fire exchanges of jabs and insults, seemingly pointless digressions, and brilliant verbal sparring are something we have grown accustomed to from both the author of Reservoir Dogs and, for instance, Guy Ritchie in Snatch.

This way of presenting characters and the relationships between them sometimes fits the rest of a film like a fist to the nose and gives the impression of trying too hard to be cool (Legend), but this problem does not apply to Free Fire. Wheatley rose to the occasion and packed his screenplay with hilarious lines, achieving extraordinary dynamism in the relationships between exaggerated yet credible characters.

He also succeeded in the difficult art of maintaining a balance between comedy, seriousness, and tension. We will not find any social commentary or narrative ambiguity here – this is pure, unpretentious joy in cinema.

Although jokes are fired off here at least as often as shots from pistols and rifles, this does not ruin the tension of a story that is largely unpredictable. The sense of humor is neither polite nor refined, but the line of good taste is not crossed. Free Fire tries to make us laugh in various ways – most often through absurdity, surprise, and interactions between characters who treat their situation with a certain looseness and black humor.

Armie Hammer, Cillian Murphy, Sharlto Copley, Brie Larson, and Sam Riley seem to be having a great time playing eccentric gangsters. Special applause is due to the first of them, which once again confirms that a sequel to The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is definitely a good idea.

It is hard, however, to imagine a sequel to Free Fire, as bodies pile up thick and fast and deaths can be surprising. Bullets constantly whistle around the characters, who crawl, run from cover to cover, and show ingenuity in seeking an advantage over their opponents. The over-an-hour-long fight is incredibly chaotic, yet shot and edited in such a way that the dynamism of the mayhem does not turn into illegibility.

It requires a certain level of focus, but we know where the characters are, whom they are shooting at, and what danger threatens them. The sound designers, meanwhile, did phenomenal work – the sounds of gunshots, ricochets, chipping concrete, and the constant whine of bullets surround the viewer and make them feel like one of the participants in the slaughter.

For this reason, it is definitely worth watching this film on equipment with good surround sound – after leaving the cinema, I still had the impression for an hour that shots were being fired everywhere around me. And while the sounds of weapons helped properly sell the action, the appropriate use of music served the film comedy just as well, perfectly creating hilarious situations.

Free Fire charms with its simplicity. It is a brilliantly staged shootout with guns and words, without striving for anything more. The action is tense, and the humor hits home. And although in the second half of the film the weight of both sometimes diminishes, the vigilant Wheatley introduces plot twists and changes in time that transform and enliven the battlefield.

The film is quite short, but this works to its advantage – I have the impression that even a few more minutes could have resulted in viewer fatigue. The running time seems calculated to the second – so that it remains funny and engaging right to the very end.

Add to this a stellar cast built on a great screenplay, an ideal dose of vulgarity and violence, and we get a superb proposition for an evening with a group of not necessarily trigger-happy friends.