"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Avengement

In AVENGEMENT, Scott Adkins creates one of his best characters yet, though I don’t necessarily expect to see a franchise around this one. Like French in THE DEBT COLLECTOR, Cain Burgess is a regular working class British fighter who tries taking an illegal job to pay for a gym. In this case it’s a quick gig for his older brother Lincoln (Craig Fairbrass, CLIFFHANGER, RISE OF THE FOOTSOLDIER, THE BANK JOB, HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN), but it goes wrong and he ends up in prison.

We hear the story in pieces throughout the movie, as Cain reveals it to a captive audience at the members only pub he barges into after escaping custody during a supervised visit to his dying mother (Jane Thorne, THE FOREIGNER). Only one of them, Hyde (Nick Moran, LOCK STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS), has ever met Cain, who has been through such a thorough metamorphosis he’s barely recognized. If rehabilitation was the intention of Cain’s incarceration, the opposite effect was achieved. A nice guy with no record and nothing but regrets for his actions was forced to develop his fighting skills and a “callused mind” to withstand the years of stabbings and beatings made possible by the perfect storm of a price on his head, a corrupt staff and a clueless prison board. He returns to the old neighborhood sporting cheap metal replacement teeth, a scar across his eye and napalm burns on half of his face, like a gnarled Frank Miller drawing. He describes himself as “A hardened, rusty nail.”

(I hope that’s his Twitter bio.)

While it has a high level of fisticuffs for a gangster movie, this is not in the vein of the UNDISPUTED or NINJA series. The fights (fight coordinator: Dan Styles, stunt coordinator of ACCIDENT MAN; additional fight choreographer and action coordination: Luke LaFontaine, fight choreographer and stunt coordinator of THE DEBT COLLECTOR) are more blunt, brutal and messy than acrobatic. I’m not saying it’s documentary realism, but it’s not Boyka’s flying and spinning around. It’s a guy trying to batter his way through the waves of human bodies that never stop trying to shank him.

Like any good revenge movie, AVENGEMENT offers a compelling anti-hero who has been wronged and betrayed in such a way that we can enjoy rooting for his extreme and immoral reciprocation. This is made more interesting by putting him up against a uniformly great cast playing bad guys with some shade to them. They react to his threats and theatrics pretty reasonably, especially considering most of them have no idea who the fuck he is. Hyde taunts him, but also expresses sincere sympathy for the loss of his mother, and says how much he liked her. My favorite character is bartender Bez (Kierston Wareing, RISE OF THE FOOTSOLDIER, FISH TANK), who is correct to want this psycho to leave her bar, and whose mix of anger, disgust and curiosity about the unfolding events is often seen on her face standing in the background.

And Fairbrass as Lincoln Burgess is an excellent antagonist without ever even doing a flying kick. He shows sincere love for his brother and cold-hearted wickedness in equal measure. He repeatedly tries to talk Cain out of sullying himself with this illegal job, preferring that he keep his status as the straight shooter in the family. But then he lets him do it and insists on treating him just as badly as any underling. After all, he told him so. He truly doesn’t want to be fighting with Cain but also is too sociopathic to choose family over business. The performances and the screenplay by Johnson and ACCIDENT MAN co-writer Stu Small make it much more emotionally complicated and interesting than the standard version of this story. It doesn’t exactly make revenge seem sweet.

That seems to have been the goal. In a director’s statement, Johnson wrote, “I have a very strong opinion about revenge as a reason for a story. Revenge is ugly, and will make a person ugly. It is not the practice of good people. The person obsessed with revenge does so at the cost of his friends, family, life as he knew it. It will affect his diet, his health, his wealth. If done correctly it is a commitment to murder, the darkest of all human endeavors. It is not a heroic act and when it is used as a way to create a ‘hero’ in a film, I always find it incredibly false.”

Man, Jesse V. Johnson. I first found out about him when I watched the 2009 Eric Roberts movie THE BUTCHER. I remember thinking it was full of cliches and in need of tightening, but it really reminded me how great Roberts is, and I thought it was cool that it was directed by a stuntman going back to TOTAL RECALL. Then he did THE PACKAGE with Stone Cold and Dolph and I enjoyed that one. And I found this other earlier one called PIT FIGHTER which I don’t even think I knew was gonna have an early Scott Adkins appearance.

I even met Johnson at david j. moore’s The Good, The Tough and the Deadly book signing at Dark Delicacies in Burbank. He was filming SAVAGE DOG at the time and invited me to come check out the set the next day, but I envisioned myself getting stranded out in the desert and missing my flight. Man, I should’ve done it anyway! I mention this not for full disclosure or to brag (though it works for both) but because even though I felt cool that I got to meet him and I thought he was really nice and charming I definitely didn’t have a sense that he would shortly become the king of DTV action directors with an unprecedented streak of top shelf work. SAVAGE DOG, ACCIDENT MAN, THE DEBT COLLECTOR, TRIPLE THREAT and now AVENGEMENT all in just a couple of years. (There’s also another one in there called THE BEAUTIFUL ONES that I haven’t seen yet, but have heard is good.)

Though you wouldn’t expect it from his stunt background, Johnson seems more interested in the characters and performances than is traditional for the genre, and he has co-writing credits on most of these. Of course part of the strength of this stretch of movies is that they’re largely Scott Adkins vehicles, and the ones that came about after he asserted his desire to play more verbose characters, with dialogue crafted for him by his childhood friend Small. But it’s impressive that none of these feel repetitive of each other. In the weird period piece SAVAGE DOG he pushes a traditional action badass into surprisingly brutal territory (with excellent villain performances by Marko Zaror and Cung Le). ACCIDENT MAN is the most comedic and colorful of the group, an all star martial arts hitman romp based on a comic book. THE DEBT COLLECTOR finds us in more Elmore Leonard/Quentin Tarantino kind of territory, spending the day with low level L.A. criminals just working a shitty job. TRIPLE THREAT is Johnson’s big deal international co-production, with martial arts legends Iko Uwais, Tony Jaa and Tiger Chen taking on super villain Adkins. And now AVENGEMENT has Adkins physically transformed and starring in a grimier and more intimate British gangster tale with an effective underpinning of melancholy beneath its hard knuckle surface. The nail under its rust.

I really liked this one. Keep ’em coming, Scott and Jesse.

AVENGEMENT comes to VOD, digital and apparently even some theaters this Friday, May 24th.

p.s. Yeah, I thought it was a funny title too, but it turns out it’s a real word. And I appreciate that because I’m always having to switch between “revenge,” “vengeance” and “retribution,” and it’s good to have another synonym in the arsenal.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 20th, 2019 at 10:52 am and is filed under Action, Crime, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

23 Responses to “Avengement”

  1. It’s crazy how, two years ago, I’d have lumped Johnson in with dudes like Keoni Waxman and Roel Reine: technically competent journeymen who can shoot the right images but couldn’t put together a compelling movie if their lives depended on it. Now he might even have surpassed Isaac Florentine in how excited I am for every new project. It’s inspiring, really. This guy directed movies nobody gave half a shit about for like 20 years before hitting his stride. It’s never too late to make it happen, folks.

  2. I want to see this.

  3. I can’t wait for this!

  4. Joe Lynch said it was a better than usual Scott Adkins movie.

  5. INCOMING is out on Viaplay now. Does anyone know if it’s worth the money. Better og worse than ABDUCTION?

  6. Florentine’s releasing SEIZED (with Adkins) some time in the near future. Then we’ll know if Johnson has surpassed him as the master of Scott Adkins movies.

  7. INCOMING is terrible.

  8. I just watched Debt Collector recently, and Scott Adkins should always be allowed to use his natural English accent.

  9. This one was really good, its a hot streak that feels more like a up-and-coming new director than a 20 year veteran. If he was an athlete I’d assume he was doping. Curious as to which if any of his older films are worth catching up on?

  10. This one was really good, its a hot streak that feels more like a up-and-coming new director than a 20 year veteran. If he was an athlete I’d guess he was doping. Curious as to which of his older films are worth catching up on?

  11. Reporting back. This was excellent. A career high for Jesse V Johnson and Scott Adkins.

  12. [generic ‘this was great’ comment here]

  13. Yikes, it won’t come out uncut in Germany until further notice. The label submitted it three times to the ratings board, and they kept saying no. Oh well, I guess I have to wait for an uncut Austria release and maaaaaaybe it will run in a few months uncut on pay TV. (Because for some reason that’s what happened with BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 99!)

  14. Anyone see the new Adkins/Barbarash joint, “Abduction?”

  15. Well, I guess I’m going on the Adkins diet, because after UNDISPUTED 2 the other day, I checked this one out today and it was a hell of a lot of fun. Mean as a bastard and surprisingly gory! I liked how all the gangsters kept trying to talk shit and seem tough even though they were facing a guy who looked like he went through a sausage maker and just came out angry. I don’t normally have much trouble with accents in movies but I eventually had to turn on subtitles for this one, the whole cast was deep fried cockney.

    The fights were appropriately brutal, and I always appreciate how hard it looks like Adkins could hit you. Reminds me of old Mike Tyson fights, when he’d just be rocking some poor bastard’s whole body with the force of his punches.

    My one complaint is that there was no fight move as cool as the insane double mid-air snap kick Boyka pulls out in UNDISPUTED 2, so I guess the search continues. Tomorrow, SAVAGE DOG.

  16. I hope you continue to keep us updated on your journey. Also I hope there are eventually a couple ninjas involved.

  17. Adkins just picked AVENGEMENT as his number one favourite movie. I have to think about that one, but I’m not instantly against it.

  18. What do you think Adkins should have picked as his personal favorite movie instead? :)

  19. I’m very fond of ACCIDENT MAN…

  20. I really like SAVAGE DOG.

  21. Well I have not been around much because the world is a crazy place right now, but I have been thinking of you all. I did have to drop in though to say that I had a virtual hang-out with a friend with that Netflix thing they do now because of the, y’know, state-wide lockdown. He asked if I’d ever heard of this movie AVENGEMENT, which he’d picked more or less at random, and I was very excited to be able to give it my most definite recommendation! Second time around, I was forced to conclude that it’s still an absolute banger and he agreed. He’s a big practical effects/gore guy and was extremely satisfied on that level alone, much less the excellent fights. I recommended SAVAGE DOG and ACCIDENT MAN in particular for his next choices.

    Glad to have had my appetite for my Adkins-fest journey re-whetted and glad to be able to share this, as they say, absolute unit of a film with a friend.

  22. Came back to the article through search just to leave a comment about how surprised I was fro the quality of this movie. This director did not do anything for me on his other Adkins joints but this… This was GREAT.

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