CIA agents remotely mind-control people in foreign lands close to their targets like human drones to assassinate them safely from the comfort of US soil. The programme is called Hardcore but its disgruntled creator wants revenge on the government for ousting him from his own project. “Mentally unbalanced”? Pish posh! Time to prove them wrong by hijacking a nuke and blowing it up in front of the President! Trapped inside his latest drone body, Agent Drake must make it back to America within 72 hours or his real body will die.
Andy Diggle and Alessandro Vitti’s first volume of Hardcore is your average mindless actioner. The characters are archetypes - action hero, woman sidekick, bad guy, etc. - and the dialogue is equally disposable and forgettable. But Diggle maintains an appropriately fast pace to the narrative with several entertainingly OTT set pieces so it was never dull.
The setup is original and it’s always clear what’s going on and why - the answer usually being ‘cos it’s awesome, bro! Vitti’s art is fine, Diggle’s writing is fine - Hardcore is unmemorable and average by today’s action story standards but it’s also perfectly fine by those same standards. It’s the comics equivalent of movies like John Wick and Crank: silly and dumb but it knows what it is and isn’t trying to be anything else. Hardcore bruh!
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