In short: Avengement (2019)

One scarred and pissed-off man with very frightening metal teeth we will soon enough learn to be called Cain Burgess (Scott Adkins), walks into a pub (after knocking out some guards) to hold a bunch of gangsters hostage. In flashbacks, he tells the gents what made him so angry.

Turns out, Cain once was a retired boxer, making the mistake of asking his gangster-brother Lincoln (Craig Fairbrass) for a loan to open a gym. Lincoln, apparently a man of principles, doesn’t lend money to his relations, though, and, apparently also being a prick, he asks Cain for a little criminal favour in return for the money. Cain’s just supposed to steal a bag from a particular woman. An unfortunate series of events leaves said woman dead and Cain in prison for manslaughter, where his brother, thinking Cain wants to squeal on a criminal business he knows very little about, sends wave after wave of killers after him.

Which eventually leads to a very scarred, hardened and angry Cain standing in Lincoln’s pub.

On a good day, Avengement’s director Jesse V. Johnson is one of the best filmmakers in the contemporary low budget made for whatever you want to watch it on that isn’t a cinema action movie sphere, helped along by a long association with Scott Adkins, as everybody should know one of the best actors/screen fighters working in this realm.

Avengement is certainly one of the better cooperations between the two, delivering the expected cheap yet crazed and excellently choreographed melee combats – Johnson fortunately belonging to the school of directors who actually want the audience to see what’s going on there – but also using the film’s episodic flashback structure to deepen the characterisation. Now, I’m not talking about the sort of psychological exploration French arthouse cinema loves (often to the detriment of being actually engaging to anyone not sharing a given director’s favourite psychological ideas), but Johnson does give Cain enough substance to make him rather more interesting than I expected him to be going in. It’s certainly an interesting move to provide the guy with more of an end goal than simply killing off his horrible brother, turning the usual vengeance business somewhat less egotistical than typical in this sub-genre, easily making it much easier to root for this particular tough guy once the film tells the audience what he has done beside murdering a lot of rude men.


For an action film, the whole affair has a lot of dialogue, too. Most of it is in a surprisingly fun post-Tarantino style mix of profanity and cleverness with a nice, quick, flow to it, spoken by actors who seem to enjoy the whole affair a lot, providing breathing space between action sequences that’s actually as entertaining as watching Adkins kicking ass (and getting his ass kicked).