Free Fire

With “Free Fire,” Wheatley wants to push his own limits of onscreen mayhem, taking things right to the line where most directors would pull back, and pushing everything right over. And what the director winds up doing is making a big, magnificent noise, one that will certainly see more than his core fanbase sitting up and paying attention.

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Ben Wheatley's mad, bloodthirsty contraption.

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British director Ben Wheatley assembles an eccentric cast in this down-and-dirty action movie, centered on an arms deal gone bad.

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Free Fire is an action movie finely tuned to even the most potentially vicious audiences’ tolerances. It is filled with mayhem, but avoids grisly violence — at least until the finale pulls out some gory, and not inapt, punch lines. Luxuriating in disreputability in all the right ways, the film also contains no shortage of profane verbal wit.

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Filmmaker Ben Wheatley's tale of a deal gone wrong is one long gunfight – and turns a tough-guy flick into a formal exercise.

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Free Fire is the world’s greatest 90-minute PSA for gun control.

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The slapstick, star-powered gunplay of Free Fire is going to kill in dorm rooms.

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Ben Wheatley's Free Fire reduces the modus operandi of the action movie down to its starkest elements.

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The British writer-director gives us lots of stars (including Brie Larson and Armie Hammer) shooting lots of bullets, to little effect.

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Free Fire is exactly what you think it is, yet more entertaining than it has any right to be. Add to that the Oscar-caliber editing (by perpetual multitaskers Wheatley and Jump), plus random moments of John Denver, and you have one of the smartest dumb shoot-’em-ups in years.

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"Free Fire" is neither the best nor the worst of the Tarantino wannabes; at its worst, it's tediously unoriginal, and at its best, it's funny and reasonably involving.

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Brie Larson and Cillian Murphy come out with all guns blazing in Ben Wheatley's latest carnival of carnage, a TIFF world premiere.

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What we have here is a down-and-dirty picture. Which is to say its entire cast is downed in a hail of gunfire.

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With his cultivated air of nonchalance, the trivialized, consequence-free violence and reverse-engineering of a plot threaded with convenient twists and unexpected arrivals, Wheatley seems intent upon lowering the stakes at every opportunity.

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Nasty, brutish and not short enough, Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire has a simple — and ultimately simpleminded — premise: to protract what would normally be a brief shoot-out scene to the majority of the movie’s 90-minute running time.

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The acclaimed director of Kill List and Sightseers attempts to appeal to a more mainstream audience with a noisy sub-Tarantino caper that fails to grab attention.

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