Free Fire (15)

Four stars

Dir: Ben Wheatley

With: Cillian Murphy, Armie Hammer, Brie Larson

Runtime: 91 minutes

AMONG the many qualities of British director Ben Wheatley is his love of good old-fashioned grubbiness. If you want a film-maker to get down, dirty, and savagely funny about crime, the helmer of Down Terrace, Kill List and Sightseers (serial killers on a caravan holiday no less) is your man.

The only time he has come unstuck, indeed, was when he went all Grand Designs on us with High-Rise. Starring Tom Hiddleston, the 2015 adaptation of JG Ballard’s dystopian novel looked gorgeously moody and went out of its way to be provocative, but it lacked a little something one might call soul (well that, and a comprehensible story). Get back to the cheap side of the street, some of us thought.

Happily, Wheatley has roundly ignored such pleas with his latest film. Well, he has and he hasn’t. Free Fire, which had its premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival in February, is set in America in the late Seventies, away from his usual stomping grounds, and has his glossiest, most international cast to date. Otherwise, it is a welcome return to the kind of smash and grab pictures Wheatley does best. Over the course of just 91 minutes he gets in, unleashes merry hell in ever more inventive ways, and gets out again. Job (near as dammit) done.

Wheatley opens his film with a couple of wrong ‘uns driving to a rendezvous at a Reservoir Dogs-style abandoned warehouse in Boston. Stevo and Bernie (Sam Riley and Enzo Cilenti) are late, much to the consternation of Frank (Michael Smiley) and his more phlegmatic oppo Chris (Cillian Murphy), two Irishmen in town to buy guns for back home. It’s a plot point you may want to hold your nose over, but Wheatley, who is on screenplay duty with frequent writing partner Amy Jump, is just getting started with the outrageous moves.

The gun salesman are Vernon (Sharlto Copley), an odious South African with a big mouth and an ego to match, and Martin (Babou Ceesay), an ex-Black Panther, while brokering a deal between the two equally jumpy sides are Ord, a smooth-talking American (played by Armie Hammer) and the coolly competent Justine (Brie Larson), the only woman crazy enough to be present.

It does not take long for what seems a relatively straightforward matter of swapping guns for money to turn pear-shaped. Blame it on the criminal personalities involved, blame it on the boogie, it happens. Before you can say “John Carpenter fans will love this”, the bullets are flying.

Keeping a handful of characters in one location for the duration of a picture, even one this short, is the kind of exercise that would leave most directors quaking. True, Wheatley does not manage to sustain the tension right to the end. There are several stretches when the mayhem seems so samey that the mind flits from thoughts such as “Where on Earth are they getting all those bullets?” to “Wonder what time Sainsbury’s shuts?”

Still, before we get to that point he has softened the audience up with some wickedly funny lines, most of them going the way of Copley and Smiley. If there is anyone better at delivering a drop dead sarcastic line than Smiley your critic has yet to see them.

Backing up the comedy is a cast of characters all reassuringly larger than life and often four times as grotesque. You can see why the likes of Hammer and Larson, two actors usually seen in bigger budget productions than this, wanted to be a part of Wheatley’s film. It’s the quality of the writing, as well as the notion that all concerned are so plainly having fun and want to bring the audience along for the ride. That, plus they get to wear some pretty groovy Seventies costumes.

Although this is Wheatley back in a familiar groove, it also shows what he can do with a little more budget. It will be quite the calling card when it is released in the US. For Free Fire read free to do what he wants next. Just the way Wheatley likes it.