Ilya Naishuller
Hardcore!

And now? Who explains it to them?
And more importantly, how?

Let's start from the beginning. The beginning is usually the director, who here is identified as Ilya Naishuller, a crazy Russian as only a Russian can be, who did something before this film that you can't talk about without first taking a step back to 1992 and the third season of Beverly Hills 90210.

Nineteen ninety-two, Beverly Hills in its third season, the future president of the United States takes over the world playing the saxophone poorly, and young generations are forced into a self-destructive and desperate rock, derivative and other nonsense people say when they want to talk badly and inappropriately about Nirvana.
Rock is dead, it's 1992, and your generation is screwed.
The fun thing was that the last countercultural revolution started exactly in that 1992, and by 1993 it would have quintupled the number of its followers.
It was only cultural: it didn't ask you to take a political stance, it didn't ask for anyone's head, it didn't want to overthrow any established control system. In reality, calling it a cultural revolution already in 1992 isn't very correct, but the foundations of the movement, the manifestos of those ideas are there in that 1992 and in the following 1993.
They are called "Wolfenstein3D" in 1992 and "DOOM" in 1993.
In '92, people started enjoying shooting. And no longer were they just shooting bowling pins; in '92, you were sweating like crazy trying to make Hitler shout "shit!" under the heavy gunfire, and by '93 Satan and the demons were experiencing firsthand that the violence of holy water was decidedly less sadistic than that of a chainsaw.
We can move forward, and to the first of you who dares criticize that "countercultural revolution" or who dreams of saying that only losers play video games, I just respond "candy crush saga." There you go, keep screwing that "loser" now.
Sorry, this was suggested by Nes, I didn't want to put it in...

Let's go back to nineteen-ninety-something.
There's no boy from my generation who hasn't at least finished Doom (if you couldn't, iddqd and screw Satan). Many truths are spoken about the stigma attached to video games, but many other aspects that resize not the user of the medium but the cultural phenomenon are ignored: Space Invaders, released in 1978, has earned 14 BILLION dollars to date. Oh, BILLIONS.
Ah, there. We understand each other. Oh no? Didn't we get it? You want to be right, holy shit? Gone with the Wind 1939 (40 years more of earnings) THREE BILLION. Space Invaders earned 12 times what Gone with the Wind made. (Gone with the Wind earned much less; the earnings of films (and games in this case) are re-evaluated according to the inflation rate (whatever that means).
So, make peace with it, video games are part of your Western culture (and not only that, damn, they weren't even born in the West...).
Again???
Avatar and Titanic? Together they don't even reach eight billion. Not even close...

It is also undeniable the relationship there has been between video games and cinema over the last 30 years: if in the '80s the Ghostbusters video game was released on Nintendo, for the last fifteen years abundant films extracted from the video game market have periodically returned to the screen. Always with laughable results among others: there's not a film based on a game that is entirely salvageable, and there aren't more than three that can be deemed acceptable. And I don't even know which ones they are; I said three just to be generous and not be the usual exaggerator; at the moment I can remember one that I save just for nerd spirit and I'm not telling you which one it is because then I'd be ashamed of my words.
Over time, however, the film industry realized that more than bringing game stories to the big screen, in an era dominated by CGI, they can bring the ways, the shots, the edits, etc. of the video game world, they can bring the rhythm of the game. And it's no coincidence if today car racing scenes all resemble any random clip from Gran Turismo.
The first two to want to elevate this relationship were Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor who, with that triumph of the unnecessary subservient to pleasure which is Crank, decided to make a film that would make the viewer experience the emotion of playing a video game. Because yes, sweeties who prefer to screw rather than be losers (your women, candy crush saga, and your dick in the loser, remember that...) playing a video game is in 90% of cases exciting, tiring, stressful, and at times it can become exhausting. The huge problem I found in video games is that they can give you the same pleasure as a sport (the reasoned insight with which I claim to be trusted resides in 15 years of competitive basketball played, and 4 of competitive basketball coached. Ah, coaching is like playing a video game in every way, it's just more for losers or pedophiles, I fall into the first category by God's grace). Unfortunately, though, besides "pleasure" as a sport, it is decidedly less beneficial than a sport, primarily from a social viewpoint... but discussing the (often enormous) problems the video game world drags today won't be the subject of this analysis.

Crank.
Damn what a hit Crank was, if you're still missing it go and confess.
Crank is irreverence turned into film. Shot entirely with a high shutter, edited as if it were a videoclip that should spin in a drotse effect in a Prodigy video. It has a hit of success because it is of an impressive Anglo-Saxon ignorance, shot in stars and stripes, and made somewhat as a joke.
This sucker of a film is such a success that its two authors hope to dedicate themselves to new projects. But no, business calls. And if Crank sells, then Crank2 is made.
The two directors initially refuse, then, cornered by various contracts, they have the dumb idea of two fools (because only two fools could do something like Crank, let's face it) and write the screenplay for a film that no one would ever want: they rewrite the first film cramming it with colossal nonsense and vulgarity. Without restraint. The project is clear: we wrote it for you, you read it, you hate it, you tell us to get lost, and finally, we move on to something else (fools, and rich, of course).
And here Italy comes into play, which you might say that only in Italy could something like this happen, and instead, the whole world is Italy: the producers, in all tranquility, send them the schedule to start shooting the film.
Because the first film sold like crazy, so you have to make the second one. How? We don’t even want to know, hurry up shoot it so we can make money!
And so the screenplay (they say it based on nothing, but it's indeed quite plausible as a thesis) wasn't even read. Indeed, among other things, in the film, there's a scene where a couple bangs in the middle of a racetrack and she climaxes while a fantastic 40 cm horse cock passes in front of her nose. (bad taste weeps and screams "Mom!!!")
At this point, the two laugh it off: "Okay, let's do it for them. Exactly as we wrote it. Exactly as they approved it."
And so Crank High Voltage comes out, which is practically like watching the first Crank after injecting an ounce of adrenaline into your pupils.
The nerd fans take it too well, ask for the third, and get it: Crank3, rather let's make the next one in 3D.
Now let's remember the aim of the film is to mount the viewer with adrenaline to the point of exhaustion. Well, 3D might have finally found its field.
And then oh well, I'm not really reviewing Crank it becomes quite obvious that they forgot to make Crank 3D and that of Crank only memories remain and these splendid two posters. the first and the second.
But the step has been taken, they no longer want to bring home a game that lets you relive the movie story, they want to bring console adrenaline to the theater, which after all, is an addiction like adrenaline, not as much as cigarettes, but at least they don't have to sell it with the pictures of tumors on the package (Eli Roth permitting).
Meanwhile, among other things (we've missed a piece along the way, no big deal, they were nerd names. oh, hell no: DUKE NUKEM 3D! we missed the parenthesis on "duke nukem three dee" but this crap isn't fitting in this page) meanwhile, in the video game world, FPS on console gain ground, ps3 and x-box are flooded by games of this genre, and if you're 16 today and have never heard of Call of Duty, it's because you've been living it since you were 8, on the front lines. Yes, maybe I could have spared that, but it makes the point.
Finally returning to Russia. Ilya likes Crank, so much, like crazy (then I'll explain why I know, or rather I've already explained it here now) appreciates the goal, and decides to take it to an absolute level.

Now, in this paragraph, I'm pretending there's someone among you who, upon reading "P.O.V." doesn't know what I'm talking about. I know you know.
So POV stands for Point Of View, it involves a filming technique that positions the camera at the cameraman’s eye level, who also becomes an actor in the film. The aim of such shooting is to make the viewer as immersed as possible in the scene. The first to bring it to the screen (limiting it to calling it subjective) was Dario Argento with his killers who kill (indeed) in subjective. Then someone invented youporn and POV became an entire cinematic genre. But you didn't know this... okay.
now you all know it, end of the "I don't do handjobs" parenthesis. Oh no, of course, you don’t play video games and don’t jerk off: you pop the "loser".

we haven't even started discussing the film, so here I’ll skip the part where I wanted to say that if the spread of the handheld camera allowed found footage to become a true genre, found footage itself has been transposing the first-person concept onto the viewer for about ten years now. Etcetera, you make this paragraph yourselves.

Ilya, already a commercial director, does a highly successful experiment that combines the snapping editing of Crank with the pornographic identification of P.O.V.s. The experiment, a videoclip, becomes a viral ad for the idea, and I imagine that if I place this link here and you open it you'll end up closing it after ten seconds because "of course I've seen it, it's old!"
And nothing at this point he completely loses his mind. Partly due to misfortune, which brings a bit of sad tears to the cinema, partly due to luck because he kept my testosterone at its peak for two years.
He shoots a 90-minute film all in first-person, edits five minutes of it, even mounts special effects on it, opens a crowdfunding campaign, and says: this is what I have available, in the pipeline are the remaining 85 minutes of film but we need $250,000 for the special effects.
Two years later the film is ready and finds easy distribution, aided by online word of mouth.
Odorama. The right word is Odorama, it’s the Odorama of this generation.
The film has a plot stolen in structure from any video game of the early millennium: character birth, immediate chaos, go from point A to point B, retrieve the key, return to point B, then for some reason you find yourself at point C but who cares you’re blowing it big time and hitting your high score, shooting here and there, the betrayal, and the end. A joke, it's not a plot it's a parody of a plot. And that's okay: Everything is fun, everything entertaining, self-irony everywhere. It’s the intersection between the world of video games and pornography, expecting seriousness would be too much even for a nerd.
There is frequent laughter, popcorn flies left and right, kids yell (rightly so, those who throw popcorn and disrupt the cinematic experience, here are in their element) when “Don't Stop Me Now” plays they mosh, when the film ends they cheer like the Prodigy audience when Keith Flint screams from the stage "And now, FIre Starter". And everything should be roses and bullets. And instead, there's the kink that everything is tremendously fun only and exclusively because of the joking tone. It’s missing a lot in the boomerang effect that images and movies should release to the viewer.
The real problems are concentrated in two points, although they can be reduced to the simple: It's Hardcore; it's not a film.
The first major problem is that the entire film was shot with Go Pros. As cool as they are (between popcorn and other doubt habits I must have watched Redbull/Go Pro videos for about a hundred hours of viewing) they still carry the problem of being a tool far from being professional, they're in HD just to say, and on a cinema screen, in the most hectic scenes, the pixels are quite large. I’m not saying that the other day we could also have played sudoku on the screen, but the definition in the cinema is quite... shameful. I mean, it’s an experiment, and that's okay too because I repeat: it's "hardcore" and it's not a film (and it still works better than the odorama); but if it was meant to be the start of a new cinematic path, well, we are light-years away from the chance of being taken seriously (and the only moment when hardcore takes itself seriously is when it asks for your ticket money. too much for a cinema, too little for the work done by the guys in the production phase. I now write something I imagine I will never write again in a film review: give them the money, but afterward. on blu-ray. stay away from cinemas.
The second problem of the film is that even if the definition were perfect the cinematic screen has dimensions that conflict with the purpose of the film: in the cinema everything is gigantic, here the absolute identification of the viewer is sought. Which is also well-curated, at the start of the film the shots that provide the viewer with their own body coordinates are great, well integrated with the "plot" (with what is happening) and would also do their job if I didn’t have to turn my head from right to left to see my hands or feet.
Blu-ray. This should be watched on blu-ray. With friends, many, who makes noise, a lot. It will easily and happily pass a lazy afternoon.
But it was recently presented as "the raid or Kingsman" which, well... oh whatever. And above all, it doesn’t reach the goal set in the post-production phase: that this poster wants to say something, and we appreciate the effort, we appreciate the spirit, Ilya one of us!, but let's leave Crank where it is: Hardcore should have been the evolution of Crank, it was only a nerd lobotomy.
the technical details of the film, however, are all excellent: the violence makes you smirk. and even a bit gross. The gimmicks to make you throw popcorn are so many I can’t even remember one, it’s all a popcorn flinging fiasco. often and willingly you don’t understand what's happening on screen, but every time it happened to me I was thinking about something else anyway, and every time I returned to the film I realized that I really hadn’t missed a damn thing.

If you want to do yourself some good without hammering your balls too much, go watch "The Commune", if you feel like adrenaline cinema, laughs, and coolness overload, go see "Veloce come il vento" (go even if you don’t care, after you'll tell me to get lost, but give that cinema some money), and if instead, the hype that for two years this hardcore had aroused in me has infected you too, go ahead and watch it. No c’mon, try to resist: in my opinion, it’s the only case in history where cinema ruins a film. oh, yeah but it’s not a film: it's Hardcore!

Thanks for the trust anyone who reached this point places in me. Thank you, seriously, I hope I’ve conveyed something to you. I had a lot of fun. Like watching the film. But watching the raid or Kingsman was more fun.
Purely for information: yes, I know that during the online fundraising phase the guys were selling destroyed Go Pros for 300 euros during the filming. the protagonist just like in any good stupid game is mute - or it's duke nukem, the film was actually distributed as "Hardcore Henry", "Hardcore" is the title under which it was advertised for two years. Hardcore! with the exclamation mark is the proof that for us Italians changing the title at all costs is a chronic disease. among the myriad quotes present in the footage the knuckle fist in the wind comes from shatterhand, the costume of... Why the hell am I going on? Shatterhand, you damn brats Infamous... Satterhand. What are we talking about? Did you just want to brag that you caught more quotes than me? And I'm not even putting them in, because then the review would become crap. But Shatterhand yes, because you don’t know what it is, and I enjoy. And you’ll end up informing yourself, and I enjoy, and then you’ll recover it, and I enjoy, and when you hold it in your hands you’ll wonder "but how did they do it???" like a goldfish trying to wank off after watching from the bowl its owner having fun with the knob in hand. Shatterhand, my sons, that I don’t live with someone called "Nes" by chance...
With Shatterhand, I'm only trying to earn the trust of the toughest nerds, who I also want to trust me and know that going to the theater only means supporting production and the director, if fun is wanted they need to wait for the small screen release. More than anything I would like to avoid the internet being invaded by: "it's crap, it's a video game, all effects..." We understand, come on, what's on the table now should be clear.