Patrick Brown/Netflix
What a wonderful world it would be if Fistful of Vengeance’s plot made sense, but in the time it takes to piece it together, we’ll have figured out teleportation. Best to just watch the fists fly.
The bits graspable to sentient beings are few and far between: Tommy (Lawrence Kao) and his magical fighting buddy Kai (Iko Uwais) join an also-magical piece of meat Lu Xin (Lewis Tan) to travel to Bangkok and avenge Tommy’s sister’s death. She died mysteriously and, in their quest to discover the whys and hows, Tommy and company are hunted by bad guys and visited by hot girls, for they themselves are hot guys. Whatever plot happens in the middle is anyone’s guess, but the good guys do beat up the bad guys. Yes they do.
Campy martial arts movies are almost always a joy, but with Fistful of Vengeance, there’s a distinct feeling of being dropped mid-season into a canceled low-budget television series. In this case the comparison is beyond apt, as Fistful of Vengeance is the standalone continuation of the equally perplexing Wu Assassins TV series. This is the kind of stuff one might find in a Blockbuster Video storage closet circa-2002, and no amount of hot actors, explosions and shiny stuff can change those things.
Vengeance could have benefitted from leaning into its own absurdity, but it seems far more invested in the cool factor, the never-ending franchise references and a new C-tier pop song every four minutes. OK, the fight scenes aren’t half-bad, even if the shaky handicam footage makes following along a challenge and the editing feels like it must have been accomplished by loose rats. Whatevs, though. It goes boom, right? In the strangest of ways Vengeance, despite being astonishingly shallow, does grow on you as it lets itself breathe more during the second half. These are staggered breaths, sure, but there’s a hint of oxygen flow. Consider, then, that Vengeance is a decent I’ve-been-drinking-and-need-background-noise movie, but alas, this Dragon Ball Z cosplay feels like dollar -store quality.
3
+Decent fight choreography
-Incomprehensible
Fistful of Vengeance
Directed by Roel Reiné
With Kao, Uwais and Tan
Netflix, NR, 94 min
