Hardcore Henry Tried — And Failed — To Reinvent Cinema As We Know It
Hardcore Henry’s first-person revolution never quite took off.
Hardcore Henry was not the first film to be shot partially, or even entirely, from a first-person point of view. If you think about it, all found-footage movies are first-person — we’re seeing what the person filming is seeing, just through a viewfinder. More specifically, experiments in first-person cinema storytelling go all the way back to the 1940s, when the 1947 murder mystery Lady in the Lake put viewers in the (gum)shoes of detective Philip Marlowe. In fact, just a few years before Hardcore Henry debuted at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, another movie, Maniac (2012), told a grim serial-killer story from the perspective of the murderer.
Russian director Ilya Naishuller’s feature-film debut did bring one key innovation to the format, however. Hardcore Henry isn’t just a first-person action movie, it’s a first-person shooter action movie. The film is structured like a video game: You/Henry die and respawn, are given missions to complete, and — most importantly — blow through hundreds, if not thousands, of nameless mobsters, bodyguards, and cyborg super-soldiers with military-grade weaponry that never seems to run out of ammunition.
Hardcore Henry is a pummelingly intense viewing experience, pausing only for the occasional flash of a serene memory from Henry’s past. There are exposition dumps, many of them delivered by South African actor Sharlto Copley; these do little to clarify what’s going on, however, instead adding new layers of sci-fi weirdness — let’s just say Copley plays multiple roles in this movie — to the already-wacky action premise.
Henry is a cyborg soldier, part human and part machine, who wakes up floating in a vat of red liquid at the beginning of the film and is outfitted with robotic limbs by a scientist named Estelle (Hayley Bennett) who also claims to be his wife. From there, it takes less than 60 seconds for Russian mercenaries to kick in the lab door, followed by Akan (Danila Kozlovsky), a psychotic mobster with red eyes and long, bleached-blonde hair who also happens to have psychokinetic powers. (To say this is a movie where anything can happen is an understatement.)
Soon after that, we’re falling through space and crash-landing on a highway outside of Moscow, where more mercenaries appear with threats and intimidation. From there, the action is pretty much nonstop, as wave after wave of enemies ambush and attack Henry — and, by extension, the audience — as he fights his way back to Estelle, with help from eccentric fixer Jimmy (Copely) and a small army’s worth of firepower.
The GoPro rig that was used to film Hardcore Henry.
Hardcore Henry was an ordeal to film: In a 2016 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Naishuller said that the film took an astonishing 120 days to shoot, with an actor running all over Moscow with a GoPro attached to a specialized rig strapped to his face. The film’s action scenes were shot in minute-long increments, and what appear to be longer, unbroken shots were spliced together using hidden cuts. It’s immersive, it’s unique, and at times it can be downright nauseating.
Maybe that’s why Hardcore Henry’s first-person cinema revolution never really took off. This is a bloody, chaotic action film with lots of moving parts, which means that the first-person perspective can be hard to follow at times. Henry’s quick movements also take “shaky cam” to a whole new level in the movie’s more chaotic moments, for an effect that even Naishuller confessed gave him motion sickness in early screen tests.
So while first-person shooters have exploded in popularity over the past decade with titles like Call of Duty and Apex Legends, first-person movies are still rare. Rather than a revolution, Hardcore Henry turned out to be a gimmick. But as far as gimmicks go, it’s a pretty cool one.
