‘Free Fire’: when Ben Wheatley focused on realism to his detriment
His filmography hardly gave off the impression that he was interested in cracking the mainstream, but as violent and profane as it may have been, Free Fire was unquestionably the most accessible movie Ben Wheatley had ever made at the time of its release.
The blackly hilarious and bluntly subversive crime story Down Terrace, the slow-burning psychological horrors of Kill List, the off-kilter road-tripping of Sightseers, and the psychedelic period stylings of A Field in England had undoubtedly marked Wheatley out as one of British independent cinema’s most singular voices, but none of them were films that would have Hollywood banging on his door.
Dystopian literary adaptation High-Rise was certainly a step in that direction after it roped in stars like Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller, Luke Evans, and Elisabeth Moss, but it was still an $8million indie with many timely and wince-inducingly brutal things to say about the country’s socio-economic standing.
For his sixth feature, though, it was clear Wheatley had one eye on taking his talents across the pond to a much bigger extent. In addition to being his first American film, Free Fire was backed by A24, boasted Martin Scorsese as an executive producer, and featured Academy Award winner Brie Larson among its ensemble alongside Cillian Murphy, Armie Hammer, and Sharlto Copley.
Essentially, one big shootout, a gun deal, goes disastrously wrong to the point the characters spend the bulk of the 90-minute running time shooting at each other. It wasn’t a terrible movie by any stretch, but it was comfortably Wheatley’s weakest at the time, with the flimsy story and undercooked characters just about being held together by the performances of the massively talented ensemble.
One of the filmmaker’s most important creative driving forces behind Free Fire was authenticity, which sounds oxymoronic when it’s a genre film through and through. That being said, Wheatley was adamant the sounds, impacts, and injuries caused by bullets would be a lot more realistic than typically found in the gun-toting annals of cinema history, which siphoned the immediacy away from everything else.
“The reality of a gunshot is massively deafening,” he explained of his approach. “We wanted it to feel that it was scary and overwhelming.” It definitely was at first, but when the central shootout unfolds over the course of more than an hour, it eventually becomes an exhausting cacophony of nothing but exceedingly loud ambient noise.
When quizzed by Left Lion on the visceral and deafening nature of Free Fire, Wheatley again referred to placing his focus on reality over spectacle. “We didn’t want to shoot people through major organs because it would have just been really grim, and then the character would be out of the film because we didn’t want them to be superhuman,” he offered. “In terms of pain, a small calibre pistol wound to the arm is apparently like being stabbed with a knitting needle. It’s fucking painful, but it’s not going to kill you.”
Every character in Free Fire gets shot at least a couple of times, but it becomes wearying after a while. It’s nowhere near his worst effort as a director – which ironically came when he did get his shot at a full-blown blockbuster on Meg 2: The Trench – but placing so much emphasis on the ear-shattering sound design and a nonstop barrage of bullets was time that would have been much better spent refining the screenplay.
