Review of Revenge (2017) by Meritcoba — 06 Jun 2018

Some people lack all sense of proportion by giving a movie like this a score that equals such movies as Alien(81 vs 83) or, more into the revenge scene, outscore Hard Candy(56???) or the Brave one. High scores suggest a good story, good acting, good cinematography and a good music score. Revenge does not deliver on any of these. Perhaps, the best is the cinematography. It is at times unusual and sometimes comes above the level of decent but it is seldom put to good use and often followed by such bad camera work that you got the feeling that two people were working on this at the same time. And maybe there were. The music is not bad and sometimes even the best part, but again it is lackluster most of the time and just used in a bad way. The acting is not atrocious, but clearly these are not good actors, they feel like those Italian support actors Spaghetti western were filled with, whose only role was to be gunned down by the main actors. What can be said is that the female lead takes the cake simply because after some initial dialogue has no lines anymore. Silence is golden.

The worst part is the story and how it is told. This lack of a good plot is drowned with ample buckets of blood which is so ridiculous that non of the tension from the combat convinces. Especially at the end the setup is so botched with too many blood that I just had to skip the scene to the end. It isn't gory, it is just plain silly.

So the story: a girl is pushed from a cliff and gets speared on a branch in a dead tree after a drop of thirty feet. Had the movie started with this then it would have been engaging but alas we are about a third or so in. In fact, they could have started with her dragging her body through the desert, prompting us to ponder how she got there, and why. And had the pursuers just be silent men who hunted her instead of having us witness their atrocious dialogue. Again adding to the intrigue. This start would have gone nice with the interesting camera angles as she hangs in the tree and seems to die. Or while she scrambles through the desert and she slowly gets delirious.

The problem is that we never get to understand how this girl, with a foot long piece of wood through her kidney area is able to go on. In fact she leaves a bloody trail behind her and kills a guy, before she finally drags herself to a cave to tend to that wound. Mind you, she only patches up the exit end, the other side, we see in some shots, is not getting treated, but has apparently healed by itself. If they had just made better used of the powerful drug she has with her, it would have been believable that it was that that made her go on, but no.. even that explanation is not used.

The rest of the movie makes you not only wonder how this girl is able to go on, but makes you wonder why she doesn't run away. She is a sweet girl with, as far as we know, no combat experience or PTSD, heavily wounded, raped and smashed up. I would have ran the moment I had the chance. And she gets that chance even: she gets a car and she can now flee the scene, giving her the opportunity to exact revenge in another way(watch the movie to understand) but no this movie has to go pick the obvious but inexplainable route of having her confront the last guy.

And here is possible the big failure of this story. There is no plausible explanation for why she does what she does, what makes her tick and go on instead of collapsing into a ball of pain or running away when she can.

In all this doesn't make for a good movie, it doesn't show humans, it shows cliché characters that make the unblievable in an unbelievable story and giving this more than a five is being generous..