The young Thai police Captain Wut (Watchara Tangkaprasert) is on the hunt for a gang of escaped prisoners. As the Gods of scriptdom decree, his hunt leads him directly into the cursed jungle that has cost his father - a brutal gangster - his life and turned the young man into the heroic but haunted loner he is.
And cursed the jungle really is. It is full of demons (beware of the Fruit Tree Maidens, boys!), very hungry and aggressive wildlife and some big but size-changing CGI snakes. Fortunately for Wut he not only has the help of some red-shirts, who are always useful when it comes to feeding grumpy animals, but also of a local hunter and his daughter.
Even more helpful is the sudden appearance of two young women from a village inside the cursed part of the jungle. Their help is of course without any selfishness and has nothing to do with anyone turning into hungry (and quite moldy looking) vampire demons when the full moon rises.
In a brave flash of originality, one of the women, Si-On (Chirapat Wongpaisanlux), falls in love with Wut and tries to protect him from her family.
Will anyone survive this most hellish of all cannibal-less jungles?
Whatever you think about the plot of Vengeance, it is hard to deny how much fun is cramped into its sensible 100 minutes running time. Sure, it is the kind of fun that is at least partly based on the viewers and the movies broad ignorance of common sense or consensus reality, but I am nothing if not ignorant. So I can't do much else than admire the anything goes spirit of a script that dumps cops & robbers, demons, amok-running animals, human sacrifices, time travel and moldy vampires fighting an especially big CGI snake into one beautiful mess of a film. The whole glorious wrong-headed thing stands very much in the tradition of Hong Kong films like The Seventh Curse or The Witch From Nepal (alas without a guest appearance by Italian zombies), films that achieve their state of being pure entertainment through awesome overload.
Vengeance isn't completely there yet. It still wastes a little too much time with attempts at characterization when it should just throw the next eaten gangster at us, but what an auspicious beginning for the career of (following IMDB) first-time director Preaw Sirisuwan!
(Oh, can someone please explain what the digitally blurred cigarette was supposed to achieve?)
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2 comments:
Haha, you've beaten me to watching yet another film. I'm going to watch this one soon; sounds like fun.
Yeah, I have way too much free time right now; and both of us have obviously incredibly good taste in films.
Fun the movie definitely is.
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