Review of Revenge (2017) by Wayne K — 08 Sep 2018

Touted by at least one reviewer as 'Imaginative filmmaking', Revenge felt little more than a glossy imitation of I Spit On Your Grave, which I don't think is the kind of film anyone should really be paying homage to.

The cinematography might be stunning, but the film fails because it completely ignores several fundamental issues. Our heroine is pushed off a cliff, falls a considerable distance and is impaled on an upright branch.

So, broken back, heavy blood loss and significant organ damage would be the likely result. But she gets off the tree, staggers away, does some self- treatment routine and is good to go. There is no way she would have survived that drop, at least not without suffering at least lower body paralysis.

But no, she spends the rest of the movie as if none of these injuries are an issue. I assume she has a role lined up in the next Fast & Furious film. This wouldn't be a problem if she came back as a dead avenger or something similar, but no indication is given that this is the case.

She also spends more than a day in the desert with no food and little to no water, yet seems utterly unaffected by this. These problems seriously distracted me from the story, which, frankly, felt like a repeat of the aforementioned rape revenge movie.

There's nothing here that you won't have seen done a thousand times before, and the movie features so much spilled blood that the characters would, if nothing else, surely have expired from hypovolemia.

I'd heard good things about it, but it amounts to little more than 'Lead character is wronged, spends movie righting the wrong'. It's as black and white as you can get, and beside some decent actions sequences and a fairly tense conclusion, there's nothing here that feels truly unique.