No, it’s not about someone who stars in porn films, though one could debate if that would have been better depending on your mood. This film came out a fair while ago, and was an intriguing proposition considering that everything was seen from the view point of the hero / villain / god knows what as opposed to the traditional film methods we’re all used to, in essence the first person view we point we all love from playing various video games.

The film starts out as you, the silent protagonist we learn from your wife is called Henry. She’s busy getting you 100% again after you apparently died, but along the way, some naughty people come in and you get ejected out in a pod because you were in a lab floating above Moscow, to which when you arrive on the ground, various hijinks ensue with lots of twists, turns and a ridiculous number of times the actor Sharlto Copley, who plays Jimmy who turns up in various situations and acting very weirdly each time.

Why this happens, doesn’t get explained until later in the film, but until then it does lend itself to a quite a high level of confusion, and perhaps that also explains the events that follow during the course of the film. There were times where I was basically lost as to what the hell was going on, but given what tended to happen, it really wouldn’t make much difference. The cast for the most part are alright, but then they didn’t really have to do that much. Let’s be fair, this was never going to be Shakespeare, dear god no. 

This is how I greet my neighbours…..

This was never going to be the type of film with deep meaningful characters and development and hell, every so often, it’s good to have an action film where you can just sit back and just take in the visual and audio fun without caring that much. With some excellent set-pieces of fighting etc with a plot device similar to what Jason Statham had to deal with in Crank, you could even just sit back and turn your brain off as Henry gets to fighting various people, most of whom most of the time you will try to remember who they are and why they’re trying to do anything.

The first person camera perspective, which was the main selling point of this film from the trailers, at times made what was going on hard to follow as the camera was moving way too much during particular sequences. This was made worse if you weren’t sitting far enough back in the cinema. But other times, it just worked and made for some entertaining footage.

Which leads onto the stunt work, and in Hardcore Henry, the stunts were just absolutely superb and is a credit to those involved, with not that much reliance on special effects and at just over an hour and a half, it didn’t drag on much longer than it needed to.

There are a couple of twists along the way for those paying attention to the plot and actually it was a welcome change for someone to try and film an entire film with stuntmen and Go-Pro cameras, just to see if it would work. While having some funny moments here and there, it’s never to the same ridiculous level of Crank and as such, didn’t exactly get me fired up as much as the “Stahaminator” did during that whole affair. While I would happily go and watch Crank over and over again, I couldn’t say the same for Hardcore Henry.

Would I have recommended this to watch at the cinema, possibly not. At home however when it comes out for all to see perhaps in a more comfortable way to watch everything, then certainly yes.