★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

First-time director Ilya Naishuller thrusts us into the headspace of Henry, a cyber-enhanced mute with a memory block in this camera-toppling POV action thriller. After escaping weirdo supervillain Akan (Danila Kozlovsky) and desperate to reconnect with his wife (Haley Bennett), Henry is forced to run, shoot and jump his way across the streets of Moscow in search of answers (and a new battery), occasionally aided by Sharlto Copley as multi-bodied madman Jimmy.





With the plot itself a backdrop conveyor belt to the central gimmick and a protagonist prevented from speaking, the head-crunching joyride and supporting cast are left to fill in the gaps. The best we have in the latter category is Copley as our incessantly annoying NPC quest-giver and Kozlovsky as Akan; a bizarrely boring mix of Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor and Tommy Wiseau.





The unique perspective of the film is a diverting element, for sure, but the field of view is a GoPro fishbowl that makes the hundred mile-an-hour action an imbalanced combination of dizzying and incoherent until the final ultraviolent boss battle: stuffed with inventive dismemberment and employment of Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ as a cheat code to gleeful abandon, it’s the one sequence that can bear the much-touted video game comparison proudly.





Ultimately, said video game mimicry cripples Hardcore Henry. The recurring glitch of passenger seat syndrome so often inherent in video game adaptations is replaced by an exasperating adherence to all the worst tropes of modern day first-person shooters: forced stealth sections, on the rails vehicle warfare and unescapable tutorials are the lesser of many evils. Greater offence is dealt by the dialogue, childish indulgence in splatter and misogyny disguised as heroism. Replete with seductive 18-certificate, excessive female nudity, gay panic humour and liberal use of the word ‘pussy’, this potentially exciting cinematic experiment discards invention to become the perfect fodder for pubescent brats commonly found hurling insults over Xbox Live.