Midnight Madness coordinator Colin Geddes is a sick son of a bitch and I love him for it. If it weren’t for him, I never would have discovered The Raid or God Bless America, two of my favourites from TIFF 2011. His love both of cinema and ultra-violence has made Midnight Madness a regular stop on my TIFF tour.

To be fair, I only managed to sit through half of Saturday night’s premiere of Hardcore.  From director Ilya Naishuller, who apparently used a similar style in a popular online short, takes an entirely POV approach to his tale of a supersoldier’s quest to rescue his wife from a psychotic psychic paramilitary leader feels like a failed experiment. Designed to put us right in the middle of the action, Naishuller’s style has the opposite effect. Seeing everything through the eyes of our badass hero, it can be impossible to tell exactly what’s going on, with most of the action movie money shots happening offscreen . The main problem, I think, is that we can never tell what the character is feeling. We see our hero run through his eyes but we never sense the hero’s feet hitting the pavement. When he jumps out of a plane, I never felt like I was jumping with him.

Of course,again- I left halfway through. Did anyone stay until the end? What did you think of Hardcore?