'Hardcore Henry' shows POV of an action hero

Hardcore Henry didn’t have just one guy starring as its title action hero. It had a dozen.

That's one of several oddities about this potentially groundbreaking filmmaking effort. The independent Russian movie (in theaters Friday) centers on a man (played mostly by a variety of stunt guys), souped up with high-end tech after waking up with catastrophic injuries and amnesia, who goes on a violent, bloody mission to save his scientist wife (Haley Bennett) from an army of bad dudes. But where Hardcore Henry differs from the usual explosion-fest is that the viewer experiences the carnage from a first-person point of view.

Sharlto Copley (District 9), who himself gets the acting challenge of playing several iterations of Henry’s helpful yet mysterious confidante Jimmy, calls Hardcore “a cross between a video game, a movie and a theme-park ride in a cinema.”

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First-person shooters are all the rage in the video-game world and there has been a rise of virtual reality in the tech space, but tossing out the usual movie conventions was a risky proposition. It was first-time writer/director Ilya Naishuller’s viral-hit POV music videos for his punk band Biting Elbows that convinced executive producer Timur Bekmambetov that the Russian filmmaker could pull Henry off.

“Of course, that was quite an experiment,” says Bekmambetov, who directs the upcoming Ben-Hur. “But I was sure it was going to work because video and computer games have formed for many of us a completely new reality that's way more emotional and adventurous than our everyday life.”

Everybody from stunt men to Naishuller strapped on custom-engineered helmet rigs with the GoPro cameras used as the primary filmmaking devices, giving audiences a feeling of being immersed in the action.

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“It was fun. The only downside was the helmet rig was very tight on the head,” Naishuller says. “It felt like The Mountain from Game of Thrones squeezing you.”

Copley threw himself into the crazy project wholeheartedly and calls it “a minefield of difficulties.”

He often felt for guys like the stunt man who was set on fire and thrown out a window as Henry. Copley recalls how a sample conversation with Naishuller would go: “Dude, now remember, turn and film the other guy who’s burning. Do what you need to do but also don’t break the GoPro and we need to see that you’re going out the window.”

Going from demoing action set pieces during pre-production to testing whether the footage would give viewers motion sickness, Naishuller acknowledges his goal with Hardcore Henry was never to change the business.

“I want people to go on a Friday night with a bunch of friends,” he says. “And hopefully, they like it enough that it’ll be one of those films five years down the line where (another) friend comes over and they’re like, ‘Did you ever see this?’ ”

Copley, though, would like to see it inspire people to use POV filmmaking with other genres.

“If you’re watching Kate and Leo at the end of Titanic, you’re crying in empathy with those characters,” the actor says. “If you did a love story in POV (and) the actor is slipping away and dying directly to you, would you still cry?”