Free fire

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Movie
German title Free fire
Original title Free fire
Country of production United Kingdom
original language English
Publishing year 2016
length 90 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Ben Wheatley
script Ben Wheatley,
Amy Jump
production Andrew Strong
music Geoff Barrow ,
Ben Salisbury
camera Laurie Rose
cut Ben Wheatley,
Amy Jump
occupation

Free Fire is a British Action - Thriller by Ben Wheatley , who on 8 September 2016 under the Toronto International Film Festival made its debut and came American US in theaters on April 21, 2017th A theatrical release in Germany took place on April 6, 2017.

action

It's 1978 in Boston and Justine has brokered a rifle deal between IRA men Chris and Frank with dealers Vernon and Martin in an abandoned factory warehouse, and Ord is another middleman. As four henchmen, Bernie and Stevo accompany the scenery for the Irish and Gordon and Harry for the opposite side. Some have the money, others the weapons.

The mood is latently aggressive from the start and the situation at the handover is extremely tense because Vernon and Martin do not have the M16 rifles they had ordered, but an agreement is reached and everything seems to go smoothly at first. Then, however, an absolute chaos arises, which is triggered by an argument between Harry and Stevo, which is of a private nature because they recognize themselves as opponents of a bar fight. After initial insults, bullets were soon flying all over the hall. The fighting escalates and the situation turns into a bloody survival game where anyone who stays alive either tries to escape with a bag of money or wants to make sure no one else does. One also seems to be playing a double game, because finally two unknown snipers appear in the hall.

production

Staff, cast and dubbing

The cast at the screening of the film at the London Film Festival

The director was Ben Wheatley , who wrote the screenplay for the film together with his wife Amy Jump . With his idea, the director was able to win Martin Scorsese as one of the executive producers, who was enthusiastic about the script. Wheatley said the film was born out of his love for hard-core crime films like Asphalt Jungle , The Killing and French Connection . According to his own statements, the director wanted to throw the viewer right into the action of a modern 1970s film.

Brie Larson took on the role of Justine, the broker in a gun shop. IRA men Chris and Frank are played by Cillian Murphy and Michael Smiley , their helpers Bernie and Stevo by Enzo Cilenti and Sam Riley . Sharlto Copley and Babou Ceesay played the roles of the dealers Vernon and Martin , while Noah Taylor and Jack Reynor played those of their helpers Gordon and Harry . The mediator Ord is played by Armie Hammer . Mark Monero and Patrick Bergin can also be seen in other roles .

In the German dubbing Simona Pahl speaks Justine, Chris is spoken by Norman Matt , Sascha Rotermund lends his voice to Ord, and Axel Malzacher dubbed Vernon.

Authenticity and storytelling

Wheatley and his wife used transcripts, ballistic reports, and an FBI record of a gunfight in Miami in the 1980s as the basis for their work . The director explained: “The agents had to account for every single shot. And the report is a meticulous record of the injuries. ”It also tells you that most gunshot wounds don't kill you instantly and how difficult it is to hit a moving target, Wheatley said. Regarding the fact that most people are not particularly good at handling weapons, Wheatley said: "I wanted to create something very realistic, of course within the confines of entertainment cinema." The dialogues of the characters, who come from different corners of the world, oozed with time and local color, so Sidney Schering of Quotenmeter.de , the bone dry verbal slugfest between the characters is cult suspicious and deliberately unspectacular use of firearms jump glorious of bloody slapstick to gangster movie deconstruction to intimate theater-debate in which the adversary their arguments underpin occasionally with shots.

David Kleingers of Spiegel Online states that while the shootout usually marks the cathartic finale of a film, the exchange of fire in Free Fire , which soon begins and then never stops, is the sole principle of action and at the same time reveals the characters' weaknesses, because the more pithy the stylish in the seventies -Look dressed up combatants formulated their demands during short pauses in fire, the more clearly they revealed their impotence and exposed themselves as hostages of their own ritualized violence. Helen O'hara from Empire also praised the narrative style of the film and the drawing of the characters. Wheathley's minimalist way of telling the story is impressive, and although ten key characters and at least four groups appear in the film, the personalities and their relationships are established so quickly that after about 20 minutes, when the bullets start to fly, you can be very precise predict who each character will attack and who it will defend.

Production planning and shooting

Wheatley planned the entire film set with the help of 3D representations that he had created using the computer role-playing game Minecraft and later published in part. In addition, Wheatley created storyboards and models based on these representations, which he used to plan the exact movements of the individual characters in the film on the film set. About Minecraft, in which the player can build constructions, such as buildings, but also figures, from mostly cube-shaped blocks in a 3D world and also explore this world, Wheatley said that this was a really useful tool for him. It is very easy and intuitive to use, and large rooms can also be built quickly in a simulation. Through the digital simulation of the storage room, the cameraman Laurie Rose got an idea of ​​how the lighting should be, what the perspective of the individual figures is and whether they can see each other. On this basis, plans were made that determined the exact positions of the actors during filming, according to Wheatley. In addition, Wheatley worked during the filming with cards on which dotted lines were drawn, which depicted the movement patterns of the characters in detail, which supported the choreography in the various scenes. Wheatley had made a total of around 2,000 drawings for the film project, which also provided the sets and were decisive for the shooting schedule. This working method corresponds to Wheatley's preferred approach to films and also shows the director's interest in comics. In addition to storyboards, Airfix models were also used. Using these plastic model kits and the use of toy soldiers, Wheatley built small models of the film set.

The film set was designed and built by production designer Paki Smith and the film was shot in an empty warehouse in the English seaside resort of Brighton and in a disused factory in Boston . Wheatley explained that in the warehouse, the walls were built from models made with Minecraft from cardboard boxes that could be moved to another part of the hall as needed. These cardboard walls were then recreated by the production designers in the seven weeks prior to the start of shooting at the locations specified in the room. Filming began in June 2015 and took place over six weeks, during which the film crew detonated 500 pyrotechnic explosions and fired 6,000 rounds of ammunition. At the beginning of the film, Wheatley refrained from using full shots and medium shots to make the factory floor, in which everything happens, understandable in its entirety. Even if the geography of the location is not clear to the audience afterwards, familiarity with the factory building nevertheless increases as the running time progresses, so that the strategy forging of the characters does develop an exciting dynamic, says Sidney Schering fromquotemeter.de . The result was a very distinct film shootout. In contrast to other film shootings, which often only work with a bang and a bang in the script, you notice in Free Fire that there is a lot of planning and will for realism behind it, according to the Hamburger Abendblatt .

Film music

The score was composed by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury . Almost half of the pieces on the soundtrack are from Barrow and Salisbury, sung by the actors. In addition, songs such as the country hit Annie's Song by John Denver were incorporated counterpoint into the film music. The soundtrack for the film comprises 41 pieces, has a total length of 50:56 minutes and was released for download on March 31, 2017 by Lakeshore Records.

Marketing and Publishing

One of the posters for Free Fire that appeared early on shows five characters from the film arranged around the edge, pointing their weapons at each other. This motif was also used in a slightly modified form for the German website for the film. Another movie poster designed by Empire Designs shows four of the characters in different colors with target markings on their bodies. Regarding the multitude of different advertising posters for the film, Wheatley said it was in keeping with the digital age and the different designs reached different audiences and target groups on the Internet.

Free Fire premiered on September 8, 2016 as part of the Toronto International Film Festival and was shown on October 16, 2016 as the closing film of the London Film Festival , where it celebrated its European premiere. The film was released in US cinemas on April 21, 2017. A theatrical release in Germany took place on April 6, 2017.

reception

Age rating

In the USA, the MPAA gave the film an R rating for violent scenes of violence, coarse language, sexual innuendos and drug use, which corresponds to a rating of 17 and over. In Germany the film is FSK 16 . The statement of reasons for the release states: “The film, which was set in the 1970s, is staged as a chamber action play and characterized by a spiral of violence that sometimes reaches into the grotesque. 16-year-olds are [...] able to distance themselves sufficiently, as they can decipher the artificiality and exaggeration of the film on the basis of their media experience. Since the violence is not portrayed as worthy of imitation and the protagonists are hardly suitable as figures of identification, this age group can independently evaluate the topic and style of the film without the risk of fear or disorientation. "

Reviews

So far, the film has won over 68 percent of Rotten Tomatoes critics . Again and again the film was Reservoir Dogs by Quentin Tarantino compared. In many cases , critics saw Free Fire as a comedy film with a distinctly black humor.

Even if in the film, according to Jared Mobarak from The Film Stage , probably for technical production reasons, the warehouse is never left, its charm, which is created by the aesthetics, which especially give it the hairstyles typical of the time and the corresponding clothes, transport you right into the middle the Boston of the 1970s. In this way, according to Variety's Peter Debruge , a film was created that combined the irreverent audacity of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs with the ruthless spirit of B-Movies of this decade.

Tim Sünderhauf from PC Games describes the film as an almost 90-minute hail of bullets in real time and as an amusing action farce of wild shooting together with foul curses, which fortunately does not take itself seriously: "At the beginning there are rows of light gunshot wounds until the body count gradually rises . “However, by then at the latest, the whole thing will increasingly run out of air, says Sünderhauf.

In the Hamburger Abendblatt you can read that you can see the thorough preparation of the film, sit down every take and the camera tactically resolves the events into action and reaction, but that the viewer hardly allows better orientation than the characters. Even if one could criticize the fact that one learns little more than the bare minimum from them, the characters in Wheatley's film logic are what they do, and in this case the warehouse is their world. For fans of well-made gangster cinemas, Free Fire is therefore a festival, the review said.

Gebhard Hölzl of the Stuttgarter Zeitung said that those involved in the failed arms deal were all archetypes and not drawn-out characters, which meant that you couldn't identify with anyone, which Wheatley kept the audience emotionally at a distance. Hölzl goes on to explain that in addition to bowing to relevant classics such as John Carpenter's Assault and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch - they knew no law from 1969, the director is interested in the difference between real shootings and those that usually go on on the screen. The plot unfolds almost in real time, the exchanges of fire resemble a ballistic police protocol, Wheatley's optics definitely take precedence over content, and for him the color, rhythm and montage were part of the pulsating soundtrack by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury, according to Hölzl.

The weapons, which made very loud noises, according to Erica Mann, played their own very important role in the film. According to Mann, the exchanges of fire were well choreographed and made full use of every inch of the abandoned warehouse. Despite this apparent vastness, Mann discovers scenes throughout the film that almost feel like a stage play due to the placement of the characters and their interaction, and the overlapping storylines and characters are intertwined. While the characters in the film try to target each other, arguments can be heard that are otherwise only carried out in a school playground, according to Mann, and when one suggests that the fire be stopped, another reacts almost childishly offended that it is too late for that.

Gross profit

In the UK, the film grossed £ 480,644 on its opening weekend. The worldwide revenue amounts to around 3.5 million US dollars so far.

Awards (selection)

British Independent Film Awards 2016

International Film Festival Rotterdam 2017

  • Nomination for the MovieZone Award (Ben Wheatley)

Toronto International Film Festival 2016

  • Honored with the People's Choice Award - Midnight Madness (Ben Wheatley)

Web links

Commons : Free Fire  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for Free Fire . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry (PDF; test number: 166304 / K). Template: FSK / maintenance / type not set and Par. 1 longer than 4 characters
  2. ↑ 'Free Fire' in the cinema In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 3, 2017.
  3. ↑ Free Fire In: moviepilot.de. Retrieved December 6, 2016.
  4. ↑ a b c d Sidney Schering: Free Fire In: quotenmeter.de, April 5, 2017.
  5. ↑ a b c 'Free Fire': top-class action drama In: Hamburger Abendblatt, April 3, 2017.
  6. ↑ David Kleingers: Great gangster film 'Free Fire': Here it bangs on principle In: Spiegel Online, April 5, 2017.
  7. ↑ Helen O'hara: Free Fire Review In: empireonline.com, March 27, 2017.
  8. ↑ Shaun Prescott: Free Fire director used Minecraft to map out set design In: pcgamer.com, April 18, 2017.
  9. ↑ James Mottram: Free Fire: Ben Wheatley on his new film, having Martin Scorsese on board and working again with Tom Hiddleston In: independent.co.uk, March 30, 2017.
  10. ↑ a b c d Mark Sinclair: Ben Wheatley on making Free Fire In: Creative Review, March 24, 2017.
  11. ↑ Xan Brooks: Free Fire director Ben Wheatley: 'I built the set in Minecraft' In: The Guardian, March 23, 2017.
  12. ↑ a b Michael Rossner: 'Free Fire' On-Set Report: Ben Wheatley firing on all cylinders In: protagonistpictures.com, August 30, 2016.
  13. ↑ Anna Weigelt: Free Fire In: spiesser.de, April 3, 2017.
  14. ↑ Michael Rosser: 'Free Fire': Ben Wheatley firing on all cylinders (set report) In: screendaily.com, August 30, 2016.
  15. ↑ Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury Score 'Free Fire' In: soundtrk.com. Retrieved November 20, 2016.
  16. ↑ Michelle Geslani: Portishead's Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury share Free Fire soundtrack In: consequenceofsound.net, March 31, 2017.
  17. ↑ Soundtrack Information: Free Fire In: soundtrack.net. Retrieved April 4, 2017.
  18. ↑ Free Fire In: new-video.de. Retrieved April 7, 2017.
  19. ↑ Free Fire In: a24films.com. Retrieved April 7, 2017.
  20. ↑ Sinéad McCausland: Movie Posters In the Age of the Internet: With the release of new 'Free Fire' and 'Baby Driver' posters, we ask: what role does a movie's poster play in the digital age? In: filmschoolrejects.com, April 6, 2017.
  21. ↑ BFI London Film Festival In: bfi.org.uk. Accessed November 20, 2016 (PDF, 1.4 MB)
  22. ↑ Free Fire In: parentpreviews.com. Retrieved April 5, 2017.
  23. ↑ Reason for release for Free Fire In: Voluntary Self-Control of the Film Industry. Retrieved April 6, 2017.
  24. ↑ Free Fire In: Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved April 15, 2018.
  25. ↑ a b Erica Mann: TIFF 2016: Bullets Non-Stop in Ben Wheatley's Action Film 'Free Fire' In: firstshowing.net, September 11, 2016.
  26. ↑ a b Peter Debruge: Film Review: 'Free Fire' In: Variety, September 9, 2016.
  27. ↑ a b Tim Sünderhauf: Free Fire: Film review for a new action comedy with Brie Larson In: pcgames.de, April 3, 2017.
  28. ↑ 'Free Fire' in the cinema In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 3, 2017.
  29. ↑ Jared Mobarak: Free Fire. TIFF 2016 Review In: thefilmstage.com, September 10, 2016.
  30. ↑ Gebhard Hölzl: Powder vapor is her perfume In: Stuttgarter Zeitung, April 5, 2017.
  31. ↑ Free Fire In: boxofficemojo.com. Retrieved May 17, 2017.
  32. ↑ Nominations In: bifa.film. Retrieved November 23, 2016.
  33. ↑ MovieZone Award In: iffr.com. Retrieved May 2, 2017.