Review of LifeHack – old school heist updated for the meme age | Video

This first appearance from the Irish web-and-zeitgeist-surfer Ronan Corrigan continues the interest of its creator Timur Bekmambetov in creating all the videos from the location, and is distorted as they are viewed on phones, laptops and PCs. The story seems like an Internet 2.0 adaptation of Iain Softley’s 90s cult film Hackers: a small group of very powerful, technical hackers decide to increase their coverage overnight by hacking a dirty billionaire (Charlie Creed-Mintles), whose motto is “I’m”. Corrigan’s secret weapon is that his site has already been tested on the Internet, so what we’re seeing is old-school fun with open source content.

Corrigan does, however, perform more strongly than his predecessors in this digital aesthetic. He throws in new faces with the air of a mobile search habit; they set up their inherent instability and distraction by quickly moving between tabs; and they pump the director’s beats through the same head filter that one would strap on to play Call of Duty. Although the script – written by the director and Hope Elliott Kemp – cleverly refers to the bluff podcaster as “Joe Brogan”, the frames-within-the frames correspond to reality: the meme game of the film is strong (if it is any kind of appreciation of the moving image), and there are no Google substitutes for R&B.

Corrigan and co-editor Sasha Kletsov slow down time to establish a tense, uneasy romance between spoilers Kyle (Georgie Farmer) and Alex (Yasmin Finney). It is only recently that we experience the limits of these video games: after the initial excitement is over, we are given mechanical pleasures, pointing and clicking between spinning wheels. As social media enters its global era, the shelf life of this brand is diminishing. (Corrigan’s defense video shows what happened between 2018 and 2020: it’s a long time.) It’s well done, even if its constant drag may make older viewers want to loosen up and go back to the 18th-century novel.