Midweek Mention... Hardcore Henry

Hardcore Henry

Sidey: Hardcore Henry? Yeah.

This, that's the order we're doing this, isn't

Reegs: Yeah, I think so, yeah.

Dan: A hundred percent.

Sidey: Yeah, that's what we watched.

Dan: Yeah, I'd not heard of this.

Cris: Yeah, me neither.

Sidey: I hadn't, I hadn't

heard of

Reegs: haven't heard of

Sidey: Yeah, Yeah, yeah. This is,

Reegs: And if people

Dan: And if people don't know what that means?

Reegs: means?

Cris: Point of view.

Dan: Thank you, Chris. Thank you for Yeah.

Cris: Clarifying this.

Dan: for the idiots.

Cris: You can count on me to clarify

Sidey: I think I had seen a clip that they'd released of this yonks

Reegs: a few months ago. Well, so it went viral. His band Biting Elbows made POV action style very much in the style of Hardcore Henry music videos.

And they went viral, so that was when I first cottoned on to this. And the idea is basically the guy has taken the aesthetics of first person shooters, In computer games and applied the entire sort of plot and machinations and all of that to a video game style movie

Sidey: So, Yeah.

so you

Reegs: you are a passive character,

Sidey: Yeah. So you see like two hands in, in coming into the screen with guns usually. And that's basically what you see, like classically, like a, like doom or Yeah, fucking halo or whatever

Reegs: Yeah, so this movie is entirely from that perspective. Yeah. So 90 odd minutes of that. And it is

Sidey: not right at the very,

Reegs: end to end, high octane action, which some people will not be able to watch this for motion sickness, I would think.

But, And then Oh, Chris

could

Cris: to watch this for motion sickness, I would think. But Chris could not But I couldn't really understand because there were so many bodies or so many people, and the movement was so quick.

I was like, who said that? Yeah. Where or where is he?

Reegs: Chris has had a very you've had a very disassociative experience at the hands of this kind

Cris: yeah, and also because I can't really see properly, especially when the movement is really, really quick. So

Sidey: missus bailed out on it as well. It is really disorientating, but it doesn't start off like that. It's three kids and one of them's chucking something in the air, juggling a little toy of some kind. And then he wings it at the wall and it smashes and Tim Roth, I Comes into the view and says you fucking pussy or

Reegs: little pussy, he says to him. And then it's a sort of credit sequence set to the Stranglers Let Me Down Easy, and it's, it's kind of a little slow mo

Sidey: like a james bond intro,

Reegs: Baseball bats and people being stabbed in the neck and,

Cris: bricks in the face,

Reegs: brick, yeah, yeah.

And it's glorious. Actually, it was probably my favorite bit of the whole movie. And then Henry wakes up. He's submerged in water at first in a kind of pod thing and he can't really hear anything and he looks it looks himself up and down.

He can see he's missing an arm and a leg or a foot and a bit of stumpy arm thing and then like the water drains and a scientist woman who will eventually tell him that she's his wife, even though she's wearing a cocktail dress underneath her.

Science lab coat. Yeah. Yeah, so it's a typical you're an amnesiac and here you are.

You're here to

Cris: also see the, the mark on his chest, no?

wakes

Sidey: scar, yeah. Yeah, she, like, whisks him through to the next room after, like, attaching some prosthetics

Reegs: Yeah, we get this thing come down from the ceiling and some arms screwed in and legs screwed in. So he's got cybernetic limbs, yeah, he squeezes and crushes an apple, yeah, to demonstrate

Sidey: his

strength.

Then he's taken through to the next bit to meet the sound guys. Yeah. They deal in sound, they're not, like, cool.

Reegs: One of them, whom is the director, Ilya Neshula, yeah.

Sidey: And they say to him, you get to choose your voice. You can be this, that, or the

Reegs: Elvis Louis Armstrong.

Sidey: But just

Dan: as that happens it all kicks off. We've got our villain comes into the room.

Cris: Is that the one with the white hair? Yeah. Right, okay, that was confusing.

Sidey: He has powers.

Reegs: Yeah, he has telekinesis for some Reason. For some reason, yeah, and he starts throwing people around,

Sidey: I kept finding that a little bit weird, because although it's sort of fantastical, in the sense that he's got, like, Enhancements and everyone has bits.

He's the only one who seems to have like superpowers in this

Dan: Well, yeah, you can kind of believe that Cybertronics has reached a level where you can get to But ours doesn't You know picking up people without touching them and throwing them across the room.

What been worked out? So yeah, it did mean oh, maybe there's another layer to this and maybe there's another Element of power that we haven't found out yet. But we know that henry's obviously up against it here because He can't speak because the sound guys didn't have time enough to give him a voice and that means that for the viewer the entire time we're

Sidey: he's a mute. Yeah. And from this moment on, it's just high octane. Chase. Yeah. Like action disorientating

Reegs: There are sort of planned down times with bits of exposition in there just to give you a break because the camera whirling so much is really quite an onslaught after a while,

Dan: said that actually because I wasn't When you Mentioned before you can get a bit seasick or motion sickness watching this I actually started to feel a little bit I turned away a couple of times because it was just moving and shifting so long and when The music died down a little bit.

I thought all right. It's it's good to look but it was sending my eyes all over the

Sidey: the shop

As in he's being chased and he's also trying to get

somewhere.

Reegs: just set like, like a computer game. Exactly. This endless list of checklists and places that he needs to go. We don't need to describe them all. There's just a few bits we need to pull out. Like, there's a recurring character played by Alto Copley Jimmy, who will turn up as, as.

Sidey: confused me

Reegs: Yeah, it's a very confusing thing, because he turns up, gives a bit of exposition, gets killed, and then turns up again as a kind of different

Sidey: Oh, what's going on? Have I missed

Reegs: Yeah, first of all, he's a really slick guy, second of all, he's like this alcoholic bum, you don't even know who he is, and

Cris: the nightclub, in the strip club

Reegs: Yeah, yeah.

Dan: is a colonel

Reegs: He's a British Colonel. Yeah, it's going really silly at this point. And so there's that going on. He's got all the objectives, a couple of the action scenes that are worth calling out. I think the attack on the convoy is really something quite astonishing when they're in the, they're in a motor bike and sidecar

Sidey: Yeah, he drives through one

Reegs: He drives through one. He's like, as the character, you know, the bike is hit by a grenade and he's tossed in the air and so are you and you're thrown onto the roof of a van where you fight somebody martial arts style and then jump off onto another moving vehicle. It's really quite insane. Adrenaline fueled

Sidey: The choreography in it is like quite incredible.

Yeah. And occasionally, I was just glad when it was a car blowing up because how they do it is he's wearing a special mask thing. They call it the adventure mask how they film it and he's got GoPros attached to that and so when he's falling or being punched, it is like, You're spinning around all over the fucking place.

So it was quite a relief occasionally when he was just watching something happen down there, you

Dan: this

Reegs: a good example earlier on where he's like thrown off a bridge and you fall, you rotate through the air two or three times and then land on your back on the floor. And because he's kind of locked, knocked out, then the camera is stationary for a while to frame the next scene.

So it's well thought out some ways, you know,

Sidey: yeah.

Cris: There is he's also on some form of battery.

Reegs: Yes, that's what propels him through the early stages of the plot. 'cause he has to go and rip some guy's heart out there, to go and get his battery

Sidey: That's right. Yeah,

Dan: got all

these little kind of missions, and I don't know if I'm jumping too far ahead

Reegs: No, I think it's

Dan: say that we go into one room where Jimmy, this character who keeps coming up, we actually find out that He is a kind of avatar, I guess, in, in the human world and he becomes a character who can't be killed or, or keeps getting

Reegs: he's grown clones. He's, he's grown sort of cybernetic clones.

Yeah. And he can download his consciousness. The real Jimmy was a, a, a scientist who worked for acon, who I thought was a rapper, was the long-haired

Dan: it was long haired. He's wearing a kind of

Sidey: If he dies, then those Jimmy dies.

He's wearing a kind of VR headset. Yeah. To control all that.

Reegs: there's a really good sequence when they have to escape the, there's three Jimmys and and our protagonist Henry. And they have to go through this abandoned sort of office building, just like a computer game, people getting grenade and all sorts

Sidey: of,

Dan: sorts of crap.

dies or he sacrifices himself that's all a game that's being played in behind by the real Jimmy in a wheelchair who's bringing out different Jimmy

Sidey: characters. Yeah. He'll just respawn

Dan: depending on on the use of the that character and that information but there's it must be quite a lot of fun for the actor actually to play those parts

Sidey: said it was the hardest, like, shoot he's

Dan: yeah well he just kind of collapses on the floor at different points Moments which signifies that Jimmy's dead, and another Jimmy kind of instantly takes his place in a different

Sidey: Yeah, so the, the sort of plot such as it is, is that Henry, Is a kind of super soldier and they're working on this super soldier plan And the whole thing about estelle being his wife Is just what they plant in the mind

Reegs: It's part of a system of control. Yeah. To, to make. And they're gonna do it to all the super soldiers. 'cause they can, they've seen what Henry will do with that

Cris: And also the action happens in Russia.

Sidey: Yes.

Cris: Moscow.

Reegs: Yeah. That's part of the reason I picked it as well. Rush has been in the news bit recently. I dunno if everybody, yeah. There's a few things happening.

Sidey: nice.

Cris: Yeah. That, yeah, that's just as a, as a 'cause it's always, you see the cur when he falls or there's like the,

I dunno, onlookers kind of either try to help him or try to call the ambulance or whatever.

And then inevitably there's a shooting and everybody has to run away or they're shot

Sidey: Mm-Hmm. kinda hurdles towards him confronting

ACON

Reegs: and a sort of, it's like the matrix reloaded bit, where you fight a kind of bunch of clones.

He's fighting a whole load of super soldiers on the roof in a sequence. Again, really just crazy stuff where he is leaping through and there's all kinds of telekinesis going on and helicopters

Dan: and, he

makes it in in a bizarre kind of scene and and really challenging.

He makes it to this rooftop where he is able to kind of get into a position to save the girl and she lets him down.

She's,

we find out now as a viewer that if you didn't already suspect it, that He is actually just being tricked and manipulated all the way through this to see what can they can do and that the woman he thought was his wife and that he was doing all this for is actually the partner of the villain

Reegs: Yeah.

Dan: and he sees him kissing because he's on the floor.

He's,

Sidey: We get to see his face in that bit, don't we? We do. Even though you're like, well, so what? It's a little

Dan: of kind of mirror or something that he's just looking at and we get to

Reegs: a little

He looks a bit like Tim Roth.

Sidey: Roth. Well, we learn that, well, do we learn that Tim Roth was his dad?

Yeah.

Reegs: And he wasn't calling him a little pussy, he was actually relating a little story to him about how his father called him a little pussy and he would never say that but, you know, he does have a chance to, I think, wipe the blood from his mouth and go again, I think, which spurns Henry on to win the day, like you say, have the face off with Acorn who's

Sidey: It's this good kill, this one.

Dan: is a good kill and and it's it's kind of something you want to happen even though I don't know who i'm cheering for now.

The goodies are the baddies or anyone in

Sidey: Well, they're just all bad, really, aren't

they?

Dan: I guess so It's

Sidey: takes, it's not clear where it comes from, something out of him, his body, like a.

Loaded veins, or

Reegs: Yeah. Oh, it's his

eye stalk. Is that what it was? Yeah, because he pulls his own eye out because the camera goes to a sort of split

Sidey: of split

Reegs: his own eye

Sidey: he wraps his own eyestalk around it. So

Reegs: So you see it from two perspectives.

'cause obviously he's pulled his eye

Sidey: obviously he's pulled his eye out. It's like that and then he goes to her Estelle with with the half the

Reegs: Yeah.

It is. Yeah. She says, oh, she says, oh, is he okay or something. He just throws the head at her.

Dan: he is like, no, not gonna

Sidey: And then he see him at the party rick does her

Reegs: Yeah. Yeah. And that's the end of the movie. There's a mid credit scene where

Sidey: Oh, I didn't I didn't hang around for that

Reegs: it's just a voice over thing where Jimmy says, Oh, I've got one last thing for you to do. So, yeah.

Dan: Interesting, interesting. It was hard in the sense that it did the whole film in that same style just for the cameras shaking around, as I said a couple of times, I had to look away.

Sidey: But

Dan: I look back and it was of a pace this movie and there was plenty going on and it wasn't like I'd seen many movies like this

So that held my attention all the way through. And yeah, for all the bits that were, were harder viewing or more difficult to understand or anything, I persevered through it and I was glad I did because it was A film I won't forget.

Not necessarily that I really really enjoyed, but just because of that style of shooting a film and the sheer adrenaline and everything that has gone into it. Be interested to know about the budget because I bet it wasn't millions but it'd be interesting to see if, you know, made any money or all the rest of it.

So you've got some of the metrics?

Sidey: I, I can tell you. Yeah. I, I sort on the same lines with you there. I really like the idea and the execution of it was like fucking superb. Some of the choreography and how they must have had to plan everything out. But just as a viewing experience, I didn't really enjoy it. I did enjoy it, but it was just too much of it. And

Reegs: Yeah, I

Sidey: through, I was like, man, I'm over this.

And I sort of was getting a bit distracted. It's really, it's It's brilliant, but it's the same, you know, it's just here's another point of view thing where we kill loads of people and I'm like, okay

Let's move it on a

Dan: here's another point of view thing where we kill loads of people and I'm like, okay, let's move it on a bit. With another character, maybe, or a different point of view and then gone back into it for action points and running points or whatever.

It might have made it a little easier for me to, to watch in and see, but yeah, it was a lot of that.

Reegs: as a, as a viewing experience. So you say it's kind of all over the place and it can be very unpleasant, but there's nothing like it in terms of adrenaline.

In terms of the pace, in terms of what set up and executed on screen, like the content is at times really vulgar, horrible, like ultra violent and horrible, kind of homophobic sometimes. And you know,

But as like it's sort of pushing the art form, which is something that you know, even in a really sort of vulgar strange way

Dan: he's trying something

Reegs: Try it's doing something different.

Yeah, so I really loved it. It's the second or third time i'd seen it.

Sidey: oh, okay. Yeah, chris you

Cris: Look, I really enjoyed the few bits at the beginning when he kind of looks around and sees and the way the water goes down. And I think when he gets out of the strip club, I just honestly, my eyes were just because for whoever doesn't know, my eyes are not really what they should be and I'm wearing special specs for them.

This side, the left one was starting to go back in

because it was so much movement and so quickly that I just and I would miss characters. So it just became so confusing.

Dan: physical workout, wasn't it? At

Cris: Well, no, again, I thought it was really cool, but I totally agree with you. If you would have been. Some other character that watches him, almost like an eagle eye or a drone filming from the top, where you can kind of see half of the movement from him, and half of the movement from the third view kind of thing.

It would have probably been a lot easier for me to get a longer break.

Sidey: Because it's it's obviously taken a lot of inspiration from video games but if you're playing a video game of that genre You wouldn't have as much action as that in an hour and a half.

Reegs: half.

No.

Sidey: you just wouldn't so it's it's like a video game to the extreme, you know,

Reegs: It's also a weirdly, like in terms of engaging with the story, it's really weird. It's a very passive experience that's sort of happening to you rather than because of his muteness and because your your place is just an observer all the time.

So that really disconnects you from the narrative experience. It might make you feel sick. As well, but it's definitely a strong recommend for me.

Cris: Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

Dan: Go for

Sidey: I will tell you because you did ask it was two million what it cost to make to make the film itself two million Which it was a lot on there for two million. I mean quite amazing

Reegs: Amazing.

Sidey: And then when it was shown there was a bidding war for it and some company that would have been at the start of the movie paid 10 million dollars for it and then all the marketing and what have you it was a floppy.

It was a big floppy And there's been a few other. Point of view movies. Not like this, but point of view. Lady of the Lake, way back in

Reegs: We might even talk about some of them on the,

Sidey: Yeah, and, and some other ones. And they all, they, they all Stan

Dan: was a POV

one

Sidey: They all struggle to find an audience, it seems.

People, it's just a lot to take in. Anyway, strong recommend from me.