Free Fire

This was a movie that I really wanted to see. It’s directed by Ben Wheatley, who made the gangster-hybrid stunner, Kill List. The premise is great: a gun deal goes bad in the first fifteen minutes of the film and what follows is one gigantic standoff with bullets flying and dialogue shouted from behind cover. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite live up to expectations. The characters aren’t particularly interesting and neither is their cross-talk. In the hands of Tarantino this could have been a masterpiece. As it is, it’s fairly entertaining but the direction gets confusing and there’s no sense of the tiny space in which the action takes place. You never really can tell who’s shooting from where.