Feature | Lights, Camera, Action! – Vendetta (Movie Review)

Vendetta (UK Rating: 18)

In the film, Jimmy Vickers (Dyer) returns to London from Afghanistan after the death of his parents in an arson attack. Once home, he sets about tracking down the gang behind it and killing them one by one.

That's the long and the short of it. Revenge stories go back much further than the movies but, cinematically, have been done in just about every genre going. The Outlaw, Josey Wales, Cape Fear, Death Wish. Keep going…

The trouble with Vendetta - one of them, anyway - is that director Stephen Reynolds has brought absolutely nothing new to the table. Instead, he has extensively raided "The Bumper Book of Movie Clichés" for his plot, characters and dialogue.

The characters are made of wafer-thin cardboard - there's the robotic Dyer, who looks half asleep for most of the film and, with all due deference to Dorothy Parker, runs the whole gamut of emotions starting and ending with A. There's the honest cop, who realises that his superiors simply don't care about justice and are in the service for their own ends. Then there is the ambitious police inspector on Dyer's trail whom everybody hates and who is a complete nincompoop. He couldn't run a bath, let alone a murder investigation! No, that's not one of the lines from the film - but it so easily could be. Try this for size: "Vengeance won't give you closure" or "I feel your pain, mate. I really do." It clunks - loudly. Dyer's character kills one of the gang members by pouring liquid concrete down his throat and lets it set. The dialogue is even heavier…

Worse still, the film tries to get into a moral debate about justice, revenge and the decline of British society. It really shouldn't have bothered, because it doesn't have anything to say on the subject, insightful or otherwise. If anything, it seems to side with the vigilante viewpoint, making it borderline objectionable.

2/10

Very Bad

With little or nothing going for it, Vendetta should sink without trace at the cinemas very quickly. It will surface, gasping for breath, as a DVD on 23rd December, after which it should find its natural home in the reduced bin at the local petrol station soon enough.