Toronto Report: What 'Free Fire' Can Tell Us About Brie Larson as Captain Marvel
If you have any lingering doubts about Brie Larson’s ability to serve as Air Force major turned major-league superhero Captain Marvel — the first female Marvel hero to get a solo adventure — the new thriller Free Fire will lay them convincingly to rest. Yahoo Movies caught up with the Ben Wheatley-directed thriller this week at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the cult British filmmaker’s previous film, the divisive sci-fi laced drama High-Rise, premiered in 2015. Free Fire marks Larson’s entry into the action genre on the heels of winning this year’s Best Actress Oscar for her moving performance in Room. And she’s in good company: The movie’s cast also includes Cillian Murphy, Armie Hammer, Sharlto Copley, and Noah Taylor as gangsters negotiating a guns-for-cash deal that goes south in spectacular fashion.
Once upon a time, of course, winning an Oscar provided actors with a gateway to meaty dramatic roles. Nowadays, it often means a direct passage to comic book movie immortality. Ben Affleck, for example, donned Batman’s cape and cowl in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice after accepting his Best Picture statue for Argo. Jared Leto, meanwhile, nabbed his Suicide Squad role as the Joker in the wake of his Dallas Buyers Club Best Supporting Actor victory. Now it’s Larson’s to turn follow suit by suiting up as Captain Marvel. Her widely rumored casting was officially confirmed at this year’s Comic-Con in San Diego, where she joined a star-packed Hall H stage that included the casts of Guardians of the Galaxy, Doctor Strange, Black Panther, and Thor: Ragnarok.
Related: Brie Larson Braced Herself for ‘Captain Marvel’ Backlash. How’d She Avoid It?
Unlike those films, Captain Marvel isn’t going to be coming to theaters anytime soon; currently slated for release in March 2019, the movie is still searching for a director. (Of course, there’s a chance we’ll see Captain Marvel or her alter ego, Carol Danvers, introduced a year earlier in the first of Marvel’s two Avengers movies.) And while audiences will have at least a two-year wait before they see Larson throw one of Captain Marvel’s super-powered punches, Free Fire will be coming to theaters much sooner. The film is currently set for release in England in March 2017 (a U.S. release date is still TBD), the same month that American audiences will see Larson face off against cinema’s premiere giant gorilla in Kong: Skull Island.
Watch the Free Fire trailer:
Being the only girl in a firepower-heavy boys’ club all too often means that you get shunted to the sidelines. Fortunately, Larson manages to remain central to the action in Free Fire, due to her own charisma as well as a script — co-written by Wheatley and his wife, Amy Jump — that makes a point of keeping her in play. As the witty, wily Justine, Larson initially tries to keep the peace between her guys, the gun purchasers, led by Murphy and Michael Smiley, and the gun suppliers, headed up by Copley. But when a heated argument between two underlings ends in gunfire, the warehouse that’s serving as their meeting place is transformed into a bullet-strewn battlefield.
Smitten with his comely colleague, Murphy’s gallant gangster Chris tries to keep her out of the fray, even brokering a deal to let her leave while the guys carry on shooting at one another — not that she really needs his protection. Even before she demonstrates her handiness with a gun, Justine disarms explosive situations with a well-timed turn of phrase that’s innocent on the surface, but wickedly funny underneath. One of the film’s biggest laughs, for instance, comes when Copley claims he’s laid a hand on a woman in violence, and Larson responds, “Right … you’ve never touched a woman,” with a subtle eye-roll.
That sense of humor is a trademark of Marvel heroes, starting with Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man and continuing through to Tom Holland’s quip-happy debut as Spider-Man in Captain America: Civil War. It certainly separates the MCU from the DC Cinematic Universe, where the heroes are grim and gritty to a fault. (Although the advance trailer for Justice League suggest that Affleck’s Batman has learned how to crack wise since Dawn of Justice.) Based on Free Fire — as well as her previous brushes with comedy in 21 Jump Street, Trainwreck, and a guest-star role on the beloved TV series Community — Larson’s Captain Marvel will have little trouble trading banter with the other costumed Avengers.
The actress is equally on point when the time comes for action. Where the men around her fire multiple rounds at will, Justine picks her battles carefully amid the chaos, playing the long game instead of going all-in on one big finishing move. That’s a fighting strategy that the Captain Marvel solo movie could benefit from; Marvel has been criticized in some quarters for ramping up to the same cataclysmic, destruction-heavy finale in every movie, something that Civil War directors Joe and Anthony Russo specifically said they tried to avoid with that film. In the comics, Carol Danvers was an Air Force major prior to acquiring superpowers, so it would make sense that she’d approach her battles more strategically than, say, the Hulk or even a warrior like Thor.
Pitched somewhere between Reservoir Dogs and a feature-length version of the apocalyptic shoot-out at the end of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, Free Fire is a bloody good time for fans of gangster movies. But for Larson, it could be merely a prelude to bigger adventures that will take her career up, up, and away. —Ethan Alter
