Avengement

A man is attacked in a jail recreation hall by 4 other prisoners. He gives as good as he gets but the onslaught is too much. He's badly beaten. The air fills with the sound of snapping bones and the squelch of bloodied knuckles on bruised flesh. Then a knife is rammed into his side. The shock stops him in his tracks and his opponents take advantage of his pause to drag him to the stairs. He's pushed to the ground and his open mouth is pressed against one of the metal steps. Then with grim inevitability a foot slams down on the back of his head and blood and teeth go flying. Now if this paragraph was too much for you, stop and leave. However if you were able for it you'll be able to watch Avengement because Scott Adkins' new crime thriller is well worth a look.

Cain has just escaped from jail after a hospital visit to see his dying mother. He's raging and he wants revenge on the men he blames for his incarceration. The men in question are a bunch of scumbags who hang out at a grimy pub where they plan their petty little scores. Armed with a sawn off shotgun and a very bad temper Cain bursts in and holds them all hostage until his real target arrives. To pass the time he tells them all how he got to this place in his life.....

Jesse V. Johnson and Scott Adkins have worked together 5 times so far. For me number 5 is their best. It's a tough, brutal and gritty as hell little action thriller that hits all it's marks. It's not without it's faults of course. You know exactly how it's going to end (Look at the leading character's name) and some of the acting may make your eyes roll in your head but as a 2019 version of an 90's action thriller it all feels very satisfying and seeing the disparate pieces of the plot come together gives it a surprising heft. And then of course there's the crunch. Christ it's all very crunchy. Although he's not bad at all here you don't hire an actor like Scott Adkins to emote. You hire him to convincingly fuck someone up onscreen. He's great at it and it means we get to see the action in long takes that don't cut away to swap out in stuntmen. Seeing your leading men smack bang in the middle of bloody action makes everything that little bit more convincing and compelling.

Told mostly in flashback it leaves just to your imagination to keep the format fresh. Plot points you assume have been overlooked pop up in surprising ways and turn up natural assumptions about the nature of B-movies on their heads. It's all well done and makes you challenge your own innate snobbery when you automatically assume the film has messed up. More than once I ended up annoyed with myself when a story point ended up resolved in a way I didn't see coming. I din't know if this was the director's intention but I liked it. There was a lot I liked about this really. A tight 90 minute long film is always a plus. And a cleverly planned and action packed 90 minutes is always welcome. Some of that dialogue and delivery though.......oof.

"Fuck me, It looks like someone set fire to your head and put it out with a shovel!"
"Did you know you can make napalm in prison?"
"What's in the bag? About two and a half pounds of none of your fackin business."

It's in those lines that the film judders. Cliche upon tired old cliche pours out of the character's mouths and combined with some ferocious cockney accents (Leo Gregory as a henchman for instance is very hard to take seriously) there's times when you wouldn't be blamed for assuming you're watching a Guy Ritchie pisstake. It's cringy but thankfully Adkins and Johnson's adherence to violence as an artform takes the pain away. There's brawls in here that are breathtaking. They aren't as showy as some of the stuff coming out of Asian cinema at the moment but jesus they feel a lot more genuine and relatable. Then action aside it's all goes a little deeper than your usual b-movie too. It's a damning indictment of the UK prison system. Petty criminals go in one side, receive no rehabilitation or reason to go straight and come out the other side a far bigger problem than they went in. It's a huge societal problem and one that won't be fixed anytime soon and it's good to see it acknowledged in the type of movie that would usually ignore messages.

Avengement is well worth a watch. It's 90 minutes of your life that you won't begrudge losing and hopefully it's one step closer to the mainstream recognition Scott Adkins deserves. If Van Damme, Seagal and Schwarzeneggar could hit it big there's no earthly reason why he shouldn't too.