Hardcore Henry was not the first film to be shot partially, or even entirely, from a first-person point of view. If you think about it, all found-footage movies are first-person — we’re seeing what the person filming is seeing, just through a viewfinder. More specifically, experiments in first-person cinema storytelling go all the way back to the 1940s, when the 1947 murder mystery Lady in the Lake put viewers in the (gum)shoes of detective Philip Marlowe. In fact, just a few years before Hardcore Henry debuted at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, another movie, Maniac (2012), told a grim serial-killer story from the perspective of the murderer.
Russian director Ilya Naishuller’s feature-film debut did bring one key innovation to the format, however. Hardcore Henry isn’t just a first-person action movie, it’s a first-person shooter action movie. The film is structured like a video game: You/Henry die and respawn, are given missions to complete, and — most importantly — blow through hundreds, if not thousands, of nameless mobsters, bodyguards, and cyborg super-soldiers with military-grade weaponry that never seems to run out of ammunition.
