A filmmaker most known for dark, often nightmarish, genre-bending
films, Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire is his most accessible work
yet. Inspired by mean-spirited 1970s B-movie shoot-em-ups—obviously pulling
from a similar pool as Tarantino did for Reservoir
Dogs—Free Fire is ultraviolent, laugh-out-loud
funny, and jubilantly vicious, if a bit slight.
Any time Ben Wheatley makes a movie it’s going to be near
the top of my must-see list, regardless of what genre umbrella it falls under.
And the idea of the genre-bending maniac Brit responsible for Kill List, High-Rise, and Sightseers
making a 90-minute shootout is more than enough to make me sweat. And if I wasn’t
psyched enough, two new international trailers for Wheatley’s latest,
Free Fire, more than do the trick—this includes a Japanese
trailer that’s totally bananas.
2016 is in the books and took with it countless celebrities,
lingering notions of human decency, and my expectations of
not being annihilated in a nuclear war started by a buffoon’s
Twitter account. But as we prepare for the impending Mad Max/Red Dawn-style apocalypse, we still have a ton
of movies to look forward to between now and imminent death. And here are the
ones flying high on my radar.
Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire doesn’t hit
theaters until 2017, but it’s making the rounds on the fall film festival circuit,
and the first reactions just hit after it debuted last night at the Toronto
International Film Festival. And to keep the hype train rolling (though I don’t
need anything more than “new Ben Wheatley movie” for a Pavlovian response to
kick in), a red band trailer showed up as well. (Oh, and there’s a trippy new
poster, too.)
One of my most anticipated movies of the year is Ben
Wheatley’s High-Rise. Reviews out of the Toronto
International Film Festival, where it debuted, were mixed, but it looks right
up my alley, I adore the J.G Ballard novel that serves as the source, and
Wheatley is the perfect director to bring it to the big screen. We still have a
while to wait for High-Rise, but anytime Ben Wheatley makes
a movie, it’s near the top of my must-see list. And now we have word that he
has another, Free Fire, on the way. It just got picked up
for distribution, which means we’ll get to see in in theaters for ourselves,
and it sounds damn near perfect.
