In the Flesh: Hardcore Henry

I’ve often described Marvel movies as sort of protracted action figure play sessions by particularly unimaginative toy collectors. By contrast, Hardcore Henry, Ilya Naishuller’s gleefully bloody first-person action flick about a cyborg supersoldier running for his life from a Cowboy Bebop’s Vicious-esque psychic tech mogul Akan (Danila Koslovsky), leaps feet-first into playtime with the kind of unselfconscious excitement only a child or teen can summon for guys blowing each other up and attacking tanks with nothing but a katana to hand. Is it smart? No. About anything substantial? No. Do its ambitions occasionally outrun its effects budget? You bet your ass. But it’s fun, and it has no pretensions to being anything but exactly what it is. Thoughtfully directed and edited with enough care and creativity to leapfrog the problem of how jarring a cut feels in first person, Hardcore Henry is frankly better than any movie about a guy with exposed robot knuckles who communicates solely by nodding and shaking his head has any right to be.

The film’s action is satisfying and legible, its prosthetics and squibs deliciously meaty, and aside from some abysmal flame effects even its more adventurous sci-fi violence feels like it’s happening to real flesh and blood people. A scene in which Henry rips a man’s hand in half feels like something straight out of Videodrome, and the various gunshot wounds, stabbing injuries, blunt force impacts, and psychic assaults play beautifully through the grimy, home video feel of the film. Henry’s (Sergey Valyaev, Andrei Dementiev, Ilya Naishuller, others) emotional arc is pretty much just grout to hold the film’s action scenes together, but as genetic scientist and remote control clone operator Jimmy, Sharlto Copley brings some much-needed genuine heart into the equation. He’s riding the line between cartoon and melodrama, and in doing so he winds up feeling like the only real person in the movie. His left field dance number featuring multiple clones and a goofy rendition of ‘Under My Skin’ is perhaps the movie’s highlight.

As for the rest, it’s exactly what it needs to be. Henry is an unstoppable killing machine who can take any amount of punishment, Akan is a giggling psychopath with the thousand-yard stare of an asylum patient, and Estelle (the preternaturally beautiful Hailey Bennett) is equal parts angel and vamp. We’re working with archetypes here, and everyone from Naishuller on down knows it and plays it to the hilt. Gunfire shreds bodies, cars flip and crumple and come apart, and a man garrotes an opponent with his own cybernetic optic nerve. Hardcore Henry is dumb. It’s mean-spirited (I winced when Henry brought the pressure door down on that villainess’s fingers). Its disability politics are, to say the least, underbaked. And it fucking rules.