LifeHack review – old-school heist updated for the meme age
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This debut feature from Irish web-and-zeitgeist-surfer Ronan Corrigan continues its producer Timur Bekmambetov’s interest in fashioning entire movies out of virtual space, collaging as it does the screens of phones, laptops and PCs. Narratively, it plays like a web 2.0 update of Iain Softley’s 90s cult film Hackers: a quartet of heavily vaping, tech-savvy gamers decide to take their nightly shitposting to the next level by robbing an obnoxious crypto billionaire (Charlie Creed-Miles), whose motto is “I’m CEO, cunt”. Corrigan’s secret weapon is that his plot points have already been beta-tested offline, so what we’re watching is at source an old-school heist thriller with especially open coding.
Corrigan does, however, commit far more forcefully than any of his predecessors to this accelerationist digital aesthetic. He casts newish faces with the air of habitual phonecheckers; he establishes their innate restlessness and distractibility in frantically scrolling between tabs; and he pumps the leads’ squabbling banter through the same headset-filter one might strap on to play Call of Duty. Though the script – co-written by the director with Hope Elliott Kemp – wisely renames a bluff podcaster as “Joe Brogan”, these frames-within-frames resemble the real thing: the film’s meme game is strong (if that’s any kind of commendation for a motion picture), and there are no Google substitutes called ridiculous things like Search Rhino or InfoBuzz.
Corrigan and co-editor Sasha Kletsov slow the tempo to establish a tender, geekily awkward romance between hackers-in-chief Kyle (Georgie Farmer) and Alex (Yasmin Finney). Only belatedly do we experience the customary limitation of these screenlife thrillers: after the initial excitement wears off, we are given an ultra-mechanical entertainment, pointing and clicking between spinning wheels. As social media enters its flop era in the wider world, this subgenre’s shelf life is surely diminishing. (Corrigan’s security-cam footage indicates these events unfold between 2018 and 2020: it’s already a period piece.) It is efficiently executed, though its relentless cursor-nudging will probably make older viewers want to unplug and retreat into an 18th-century novel.
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