Point of View: HARDCORE HENRY

There are some theoretically cool death-defying stunts going on in Hardcore Henry, an exhaustingly extreme action movie. It’s too bad the production is too committed to its gimmick to take advantage of them. The whole thing is shot in first-person, a gauntlet of gnarly chaos from the unblinking perspective of a silent stuntman protagonist, an uncommunicative amnesiac cyborg soldier. There’s a good reason why, in over a century of cinema, there has very rarely been a feature shot entirely in this style. (This parenthetical is the obligatory reference to Robert Montgomery’s 1947 noir Lady in the Lake, the closest this novelty ever came to working.) Spending the entire time watching bobbling frames with the occasional limb swinging through just doesn’t work, especially when thrown into an ugly, nasty movie of smeary GoPro parkour and vacant characterizations conspiring to create a propulsive narrative of dehumanizing brutality. It’s quickly tiresome, a numbing cacophony of visual noise.

It’s halfway between a virtual reality theme park experience and a first-person shooter, with none of the immersion of the former or the interactivity of the latter. The movie wakes up with its protagonist, some unknown fit guy who has been Robocop-ed before the story began. He doesn’t know who he is or why he’s in this bionic state. All he knows is that his wife (Haley Bennett) is the scientist who saved his life. There’s not much downtime before she’s kidnapped, a snarling Russian villain with telekinetic powers (Danila Kozlovsky) taking her away. Seeing this Princess Peach snatched away by a mean Bowser gives our hero all the motivation he needs to rampage through waves of anonymous henchmen who pop up in a variety of locations: a highway, a subway station, a high rise, a brothel, a forest, a field, a decrepit hotel, and a skyscraper. For a guide he has an endlessly regenerated helper (played in all its guises – a cabbie, a biker, a coked-up nut, and more – by Sharlto Copley) who helpfully remotely updates his smart phone with the latest maps and missions. It’s gamified action taken to its illogical conclusion.

The brutally simple movie becomes essentially a 90-minute stunt show and shooting gallery. It’s repetitive and nasty, rounds of ammunition and grotesque splatter separated only by grindingly bland exposition, flashes of oddball gallows humor, and a few truly nifty chase sequences. Seeing the camera protagonist take off running up the side of a building or across a park is good for some fleeting thrills. More often, though, we’re stuck in the point-of-view of a merciless killer mowing down his prey indiscriminately and with upsettingly gory excess. This is a movie that’s pornographically violent. I don’t mean that as knock against the adverb, but as a description of the film’s explicit imagery. It’s preoccupied with the penetration of bullets and knives into the flesh and viscera of its combatants, eager to watch the plunge of a projectile in the torso of a living, breathing being. To see the film is to be trapped in the viewpoint of a faceless mindless rage-driven killer, stripped of all humanity and characterization as he obliterates random foes, being asked to imagine oneself in his place. It’s queasy-making.

Comprehensively amoral, right down to its gross misogyny – a lengthy sequence finds prostitutes helpless in crossfire, and later a few key twists reveal a woman as the puppeteer of all the man’s pain – and total disregard for human life, it’s a movie catering to its target crowd’s worst impulses. Writer-director Ilya Naishuller, in his feature debut, has clearly marshaled talented, athletic cast and crew to carry out the action, figuring out some complicated staging and pulling it off with precision and skill. And he’s made a far more cinematically palatable vision than you’d expect to see from footage captured on the forehead of a stuntperson. The camerawork is sometimes clever, but the effect isn’t when tied to faulty story and structure. And there’s an overwhelming sense of futility when the stunts are only worth appreciating if you can fill in the surroundings – imagining the car flip you only half see beneath the leaping camera – and ignore the bloody muck of the mean, empty content around them.

Fanged Up: VAMPIRE ACADEMY

Vampire Academy doesn’t seem finished. It feels like the filmmakers gave up on it, like on some fundamental level the story just wasn’t working and instead of taking the time to fix it, they filmed it anyway. The movie is flavorless, unimaginative, and often uncommunicative as it gets tangled up in its own jargon. The story starts with two runaway vampires who are quickly caught and returned to their Vampire Academy where the headmistress is awful disappointed or something. Then it becomes a teen high school movie that’s neither horror nor comedy. It involves sub-Harry Potter schoolyard conspiracies and pseudo-Twilight divisions and hierarchies of vampiric magic and wars between a variety of clans the names of which I could never keep straight despite the movie never missing an opportunity to talk about it. The movie is all tell, no show, and all the worse for it, especially since all that telling left me mostly hopelessly confused. By the time the movie finishes clearing its throat, it manages to bump up against some modest entertainment value for about five minutes. That hardly seems worth it.

We’re introduced to the movie’s taxonomy of vampires with an expositional voiceover reinforced by key terms turning up on screen in bold lettering. There are Dhampir, half-human vampires, Moroi, royal vampires, and Strigoi, who can only be evil, as represented by their paler-than-usual vampire skin and bloodshot eyes. Don’t quiz me on their differences. I only got that far by checking Wikipedia. Our leads, the runaways the story opens upon, are best friends who snuck away from the school for what seems to be a Very Important Reason that remains vague. One is a Dhampir girl (Zoey Deutch) who has some psychic connection to her friend (Lucy Fry), a Moroi who may be in line to be the next Vampire Queen. She can read her friend’s thoughts; it is cool in theory, but in practice involves her essentially watching scenes she’s not in and commenting on them for us to hear.

The head of the school (Olga Kurylenko) begrudgingly lets the girls back into the school on the condition that the Dhampir trains to protect royal pal. From there, class is in session, taking us straight into plot contortions involving a nerdy third wheel (Sarah Hyland), ex-boyfriends (Edward Holdcroft and Ashley Charles), guys with crushes (Dominic Sherwood and Cameron Monaghan), a vindictive catty girl (Sami Gayle), a missing teacher (Claire Foy), a glowering Russian combat trainer (Danila Kozlovsky), and an ill vampire gentleman (Gabriel Byrne). One or more of them may be behind the ominous messages written in blood that turn up to menace our leads. That’s a lot of characters to juggle, too many I’d say, since almost none of them get satisfying introductions or resolutions. They’re just there.

Maybe fans of the young adult book series upon which this is based could make sense of all these characters, with their variety of backstories and motivations. I couldn’t, despite the movie spending so much of its runtime trying to fill me in on the pertinent details. If there was ever a scene not devoted to explicitly explaining its place in the plot, I must’ve missed it. And yet, there’s not a bit of narrative momentum on which to hang all this talk. What curses, powers, magic, histories, grudges, potions, talismans, spells, creatures, bloodlines, and insults are supposed to matter most when they’re all given the same flatlining importance?

Screenwriter Daniel Waters (of Heathers) and his brother, director Mark Waters (of Mean Girls), know a thing or two about staging high school comedies, but here it’s as if they were working from an outline and forgot to flesh out the characters’ personalities and their film’s tone along the way to a finished product. Some attempts at memorable quips – “they looked at me like I was a porcupine in a hot tub” – fall flat since I couldn’t get my bearings in the setting or understand who any of these characters are. Who runs this school? What is at stake? Why should we care? I certainly couldn’t tell you. It’s a shame the filmmakers couldn’t either. It doesn’t help that it’s all shot in a dull haze and edited together with no feeling for spatial coherence.

It’s all a bland blur, endlessly telling us what is happening, why it’s happening, and what the pertinent fantasy gibberish is, and yet still communicating almost nothing about its world or why we should be invested in it. The movie is an uninvolving mishmash of tones, wobbling from snark to snarling danger to snoozy exposition with little sense of impact or understanding of cause and effect. Worldbuilding isn’t easy, all the more because it should look easy, but if after two hours of painfully obvious hard work I couldn’t begin to tell you even the simplest facts about your fantasy world and the plotlines running through it, something has gone disastrously wrong.

I spent the film scowling, wondering if I was simply zoning out during the most important information or if every scene was really skipping away into the next with little concern for pacing or personality. I’m sure it was the latter. It’s telling that only the climactic action – when the characters finally shut up about their powers and dangers and put them to use – comes close to working on any level. More telling is this line of dialogue one girl says to the other after events have gotten largely incomprehensible: “I can’t remember who loves us and who hates us.” If they don't know, what hope did I have?