(SeaPRwire) – While Hardcore Henry was not the first film to utilize a first-person perspective, as even found-footage movies inherently adopt this viewpoint, and experiments in first-person storytelling date back to the 1947 murder mystery Lady in the Lake, and a more recent example being the 2012 serial-killer film Maniac, Russian director Ilya Naishuller’s feature-film debut did introduce a significant innovation to the format.
Hardcore Henry is not merely an action movie shot from a first-person perspective; it is a first-person shooter action movie. The film is structured like a video game, featuring mechanics such as dying and respawning, mission objectives, and the continuous elimination of numerous adversaries with an seemingly inexhaustible supply of weaponry.
The viewing experience of Hardcore Henry is relentlessly intense, with brief interludes of serene memories from Henry’s past. Exposition is delivered in large doses, often by South African actor Sharlto Copley, which tend to add further layers of science-fiction peculiarity rather than clarify the plot. Copley notably portrays multiple characters in the film.
Henry is depicted as a cyborg soldier, a fusion of human and machine, who awakens in a vat of red liquid. He is fitted with robotic limbs by a scientist named Estelle (Hayley Bennett), who also claims to be his wife. Within the first minute, Russian mercenaries breach the lab, followed by Akan (Danila Kozlovsky), a psychopathic mobster with red eyes and bleached blonde hair who possesses psychokinetic abilities. The film operates on the principle that virtually anything can happen.
Shortly thereafter, the narrative involves falling through space and crash-landing on a highway near Moscow, where further mercenary encounters occur. The action then becomes almost continuous, with Henry, and by extension the audience, facing relentless waves of enemies as he fights his way back to Estelle, aided by the eccentric fixer Jimmy (Copley) and a substantial arsenal.
The filming of Hardcore Henry was a demanding undertaking. Director Naishuller revealed in a 2016 interview that shooting took 120 days, involving an actor running through Moscow with a GoPro attached to a specialized rig. Action sequences were filmed in minute-long segments, with longer, seemingly unbroken shots achieved through concealed cuts. The result is an immersive and unique, though at times disorienting, experience.
Perhaps this intensity is why the revolution of first-person cinema that Hardcore Henry aimed for never truly materialized. The film’s intricate and chaotic action, coupled with its first-person viewpoint, can make it difficult to follow at times. Henry’s rapid movements amplify the “shaky cam” effect to an extreme, a technique that even Naishuller admitted caused motion sickness during early tests.
Consequently, while first-person shooter video games have seen immense growth over the last decade with titles like Call of Duty and Apex Legends, first-person movies remain a rarity. Instead of a cinematic revolution, Hardcore Henry ultimately proved to be a gimmick, albeit a rather compelling one.
Hardcore Henry is currently available for streaming on Plex and The Roku Channel.
This article is provided by a third-party content provider. SeaPRwire (https://www.seaprwire.com/) makes no warranties or representations regarding its content.
Category: Top News, Daily News
SeaPRwire provides global press release distribution services for companies and organizations, covering more than 6,500 media outlets, 86,000 editors and journalists, and over 3.5 million end-user desktop and mobile apps. SeaPRwire supports multilingual press release distribution in English, Japanese, German, Korean, French, Russian, Indonesian, Malay, Vietnamese, Chinese, and more.