Movie reviews: Free Fire, Ghost in the Shell, The Boss Baby

Here are the top three films you don’t want to miss this week, writes Declan Burke.

Free Fire 4/5

Ghost in the Shell 4/5

The Boss Baby 4/5

Set in a Boston warehouse in 1978, Free Fire (15A) opens with an arms deal brokered by Justine (Brie Larson) between Irish paramilitaries, headed by Frank (Michael Smiley) and Chris (Cillian Murphy), and South African arms dealers, led by Ord (Armie Hammer).

A powder keg of mutual distrust and macho posturing, the deal goes ka-boom when personal differences result in frenzied gunplay.

Spread out all over the warehouse, the two gangs go to war, with only generalised ineptitude preventing total carnage.

Written by Amy Jump and Ben Wheatley, with Wheatley directing, Free Fire is a blackly comic shoot-’em-up with the emphasis very strongly placed on the mordant humour.

It’s deliberately cartoonish, with the bickering within the respective gangs resulting in as many injuries caused by ‘friendly fire’ as anything deliberately aimed by an enemy; meanwhile, with no clear battle-lines drawn, the protagonists are scattered all over the warehouse, which means both sides are liable to take pot-shots from almost any direction.

The one-liner zingers are tossed out like so much hot lead, and a terrific cast revel in the clowning as the ostensibly hardboiled anti-heroes find themselves stumbling through a comedy of errors (full marks, too, for the most incongruous use ever of John Denver’s ‘Annie’s Song’).

Amy Jump and Ben Wheatley may well be mocking gun violence with Free Fire, but they have their cake and eat it too, delivering a pulsating thriller that looks a lot how The A-Team might have turned out if they’d hired Sam Peckinpah to direct.

Ghost in the Shell (15A) stars Scarlett Johansson as Major, a cyber-enhanced miracle of the Hanka Robotics with a synthetic body and a human brain.

When Hanka Robotics finds itself under threat from the reengage cyborg Kuze (Michael Pitt), Major and the rest of Section 9, led by Aramaki (‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano), swing into action.

Soon, however, Major finds herself doubting her own identity, and haunted by the ghost of a former self that appears to be trapped inside her synthetic shell.

Adapted by Jamie Moss and William Wheeler from Masamune Shirow’s manga series, and directed by Rupert Sanders, Ghost in the Shell opens as a potentially fascinating investigation into what makes us truly human — there are consequences, apparently, ‘to messing with the human soul’ — then quickly becomes a pounding, pulsating thriller.

Set in a fabulously realised futuristic dystopia (think Blade Runner on acid), the story is a convoluted yarn rooted in corporate espionage and Hanka Robotics’ ruthless pursuit of perfection, the moral of which appears to be that humans and technology are equally positive, providing we can all learn to get along.

Johansson, who spends half the movie wearing a skin-tight flesh-coloured sheath, makes for a dynamic action heroine, dispatching villains and minions with aplomb wherever she goes, although cult hero ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano is woefully underused as her deskbound, monosyllabic superior.

The parallels with Blade Runner are undeniable, right down to Lorne Balfe and Clint Mansell’s Vangelis-style soundtrack, but Ghost in the Shell is an absorbing sci-fi thriller in its own right.

Seven-year-old Tim (voiced by Miles Bakshi) is perfectly happy as an only child, until a younger brother — aka The Boss Baby (G) — arrives to steal the limelight.

His parents presume that Tim’s objections to the new arrival are rooted in jealousy, but it’s not long before the truth is revealed: Boss Baby (Alec Baldwin) is a hard-nosed middle-manager with Baby Corp, a company in danger of going bankrupt due to the cuter product being delivered by their rivals, Puppy Co. With the future of the human race at stake, Tim and Boss Baby set out to expose the great Puppy Co scam…

Previously the director of Megamind and the Madagascar trilogy, Tom McGrath crafts a terrific set-up in The Boss Baby, with Alec Baldwin relishing the opportunity to reprise his role as the tyrannical Blake in Glengarry Glen Ross, albeit in this case as a cigar-chomping infant in diapers; meanwhile, some of the animation, particularly when young Tim indulges in daydreams, is delivered in a delightfully retro style.

The story plateaus around the hour mark, however; it’s as if the makers, once all their ducks are in a row, belatedly realise they don’t have any destination in mind.

That said, younger viewers will likely thrill to the secret life of infants, as the Boss Baby gathers a team of like-minded toddler villains around him, while parents will be amused at the stream of one-liners and asides that dare to suggest that child-rearing might not be entirely a bed of roses.