Life Gave Us the Worst Action Movie of the Year in ‘Hardcore Henry’

Imagine a virtual reality simulation. A helmet is placed on your head, and in front of your eyes lights up a whole world of action and adventure, thrusting you into a land of intrigue where you yourself are the protagonist, allowed to experience the wonder of storytelling from a beautifully unique, first-person perspective. Hardcore Henry is not that movie. Imagine, instead, that after the helmet is placed on your head, it immediately glitches, playing in graphic and repetitive detail the diary of schizophrenic in cinematic form, while someone taps your head repeatedly with a hammer – soft enough not to cause harm but hard enough to drive you nearly mad – while you plummet from a 40-story building. Wearing wet underwear. That’s Hardcore Henry. Hardcore Henry is, in short, one of the most poorly written, obnoxiously intense, painfully exhausting action films I’ve seen in my life.

The film is shown from a first-person point of view, with viewers taking the perspective of Henry, a cyborg on the run for his life. He’s running from a man who has inexplicable telekinesis and unclear goals – goals that remain almost hilariously unclear through the entirety of the film, which is in stride with the rest of the film overarching theme of not making much sense. All Henry knows – all you know – is that he woke up with amnesia, Magneto bursts through his hospital room door, and he’s trying to kill you and your wife. So you run, and you fight, through 90 minutes of non-stop shaky-cam actio…