Review: Hardcore Henry is the crazy cyborg beatdown movie you always wanted

Do not mess with anyone whose knuckles are literally made of metal. (credit: Hardcore Henry)

If you need an antidote for the overblown blah of Batman v Superman, your medicine has arrived in the form of Hardcore Henry, a surprisingly great sci-fi shoot-em-up that moves at the pace of a first-person shooter on speed—and crack, and some LSD for good measure. It’s the comic-violent tale of deadly cyborgs, dope-smoking clones, and a telekinetic gangster-corporate oligarch in Russia. And it has a great soundtrack, too.

Shot entirely from the perspective of Henry with head-mounted GoPro cameras, the movie begins with a familiar cyborg premise. We watch through Henry’s eyes as he boots up, looks down in confusion at the newly installed power ports in his chest, then watches as an engineer screws on his new bionic arm and leg. The engineer tells Henry that she’s his wife, and she hopes one day he’ll remember how much they loved each other. But there’s no time for lovey-dovey, nor to install Henry’s voice box, because the lab is immediately attacked by bad guys. As they run for their lives, Henry discovers that the lab is actually in a zeppelin, and he and the engineer barely have time to launch themselves in the sole remaining escape pod.

In the middle of all this, we realize that the engineer—who jokes that Henry “never liked” her work—has done kind of a half-assed job covering Henry’s bionic arm with skin. She’s left his knuckles bare, so that four gleaming metal joints show through. Of course, these perma-brass knuckles will come in handy, because Henry is going to spend this entire movie wordlessly pounding the crap out of people using every weapon on his body and in his arsenal.