Critic Reviews

By allowing viewers to step into the shoes of a wall-climbing Jackie Chan, a parkour-sprinting Daniel Craig or a bullet-spraying Ahnold, it does something that live action has never attempted before. The carnage flies—it’s possible to miss a lot of it. But if action movies are meant to be stunning, Hardcore Henry can proudly take its place among the giants. Even better, it lets you stand with them.

The film is an exhilarating and inventive spectacle that makes every other action film from the last 10 years look as obsolete as the Lumière brothers running that train at you back in 1896.

The film's unbelievably precise choreography of action seeks to tap into a universal feeling of powerlessness.

A head-spinning, whirling dervish of an action movie.

Is it much of a movie? Not really. It’s more of an experience – a passive sort of virtual reality – that uses a bare-bones narrative as a vehicle for a big-time body count.

Hardcore blasts along like a supercharged computer-game shoot-em-up, bursting with sick humor and splatterpunk violence.

Hardcore feels like umpteen post-“Star Wars” action blockbusters trash-compacted into one — and whether that fundamentally appeals or not, the ingenuity of effort is undeniably high.

It feels longer than 90 minute because, despite changing locations frequently enough, Ilya Naishuller‘s debut feature never really has a strong sense of structure nor escalation to make it as truly kinetic as it wants. Yet, at least to some degree, the right spirit is there to lift it through some of the deadening stretches.

Presented with a moral universe where annihilation is all, it’s difficult to invest in the film as anything more significant than a breathless series of punishing vignettes.

Hardcore Henry is like a good roller-coaster in that it does not require a complex reason to be: it's there, it's fun, you ride it, and that's about it.