Free Fire (Ben Wheatley, 2016)

An arms deal in a warehouse goes awry very quickly amidst macho posturing and all the characters spend the rest of the film shooting lumps out of each other. And then more lumps.
It's all very easy for the director to deflect criticism of the casual and continuous violence under the cover that it's a pastiche of Tarantino, but Tarantino pastiches himself and Reservoir Dogs, from which this lifts the end scene and expands it into a whole film, not only had substantially more wit but made sure we knew that being shot hurts like hell. Here, in a misguided attempt at turning it all into Grand Guignol comedy, being hit by a bullet is just an inconvenient setback. The whole film is a more serious setback in the career of a promising, idiosyncratic director: it's worrying that his first film obviously made for the U.S. market (after five leftfield British ones) is so unambitious, wholly lacking any personality.

4/10