Hardcore Henry (2016), R, ★★

The first action movie from a first person POV.

I had moderate expectations with this movie because with the technique of having the cameraman being placed from a first-person point-of-view and tries to take the movie like an experience in a theater. And because I was excited from the technique standpoint, I was wondering how they are going to create a story to navigate the character into action set-pieces and some complex storylines. This is an action extravaganza that pushes the scenes to the edge of disbelief. And, some of the action was awesome, but the movie drags down to a story that is not credible and is treated as a footnote because this movie is more of a virtual reality experience than a product for moviegoers to routinely watch another time.

An adult Henry wakes up in a facility and a woman named Estelle (Haley Bennett) brings him up from a water tank and he sees his left forearm and left leg replaced with robotic limbs. He is unable to speak since his voice box has not installed yet and has no memory as to how he got to the water tank. As Estelle and a few other scientists prepare to install a voice box, a team of mercenaries led by Akan (Danila Kozlovsky) attack them and as Estelle plays loud music to distract the mercenaries, Estelle and Henry escape into a pod and eject from a facility and land on a bridge.

Another team of mercs led by Yuri (Oleg Poddubnyy) arrive and they push Henry off the bridge. When he tries to fight off the villains, a driver out of nowhere pushes the villains and kills two other mercs and he introduces himself to Henry and his name is Jimmy (Sharlto Copley, who has various disguises along the way to show Henry what he needs to do and where he needs to go.) Henry needs to go out of the way to avoid Akan and his goons or just simply kill them.

Sharlto Copley as Jimmy. 

When I was watching it in the theater, I thought to myself that this is a going to be a mesmerizing experience. But, that's all that it was: an experience but it was mesmerizing initially then it got tiresome and a bit nauseating for my taste. I don't know if this would work as a movie to be on Netflix but it should have been. The main problem is that the story starts out with very little information as to why Henry is what he is and does not give us any more clarity. He's just a hardcore robotic killer and we witness what he is from a GoPro camera on a stuntman. (It's a fact. Trust me.)

Not all of the performances are sublime but the one standout performance is Sharlto Copley because he provides genuine humor to some of his characters to takes the movie to another level in terms of character, story and a little bit of the action sequences. But, when he is not on-screen, the movie goes haywire into plain old video-game action with very little purpose as to what's going on. It's like being in a focus group for a marketing firm that the executives are telling us just to play the cool, violent action video game but we don't know what the purpose is to accomplish the game.

Writer and director Ilya Naishuller creates an ambitious movie that is filled with action and a neat premise but the whole movie, unfortunately, is a gimmick with a vague storyline that wears itself thin near the end and does not make that much sense. I will give them the premise, the action sequences near the beginning and Copley but the storytelling has little narrative and the mind-numbing camerawork is a bit infuriating when it is over. The visual ambitions take over the logic and wraps itself into an adrenaline rush that will run out before the movie will be over real quickly.

**