★★★
“Hell hath no fury?”
This had a fair number of decent and well-done elements. However, it very much feels like these are balanced by the aspects which fall short of adequate. How you react to this will likely be determined by your ability to overlook the latter, and appreciate the former. The basic idea is lean and mean. Sisters Jas (Purvis) and Laura (Pauley) are on a country weekend, when they encounter a car-load of men led by the particularly sleazy Randy (North). This leads to a home-invasion, a dead Laura, and Jas going on a rampage of revenge through everyone Randy can throw at her. Fair enough there, with enough brutal violence to leave the most blood-thirsty satisfied.
But I have questions. So many questions. Why does one sister have an American accent? Why are the villains so utterly incompetent? I mean, they can’t even tie Jas up for ten seconds – never mind taking advantage of the many, many opportunities to dispose of her entirely. Don’t even get me started on the gas canister scene: hello, throw it through the window? How does Jas, who has never been in the area, magically know the location of their headquarters, and so can head straight for it? Where did she acquire that very particular set of skills? All we get is a passing reference to her having taken a self-defense class – all I can say is, these lessons must have been given by John Wick.
Because Jas goes from zero to stabbing someone in the neck, in about thirty seconds after finding the body of her sister, and takes more damage than a crash-test dummy, without flinching. As for calling the authorities? It’s vastly over-rated. This really leaves her character with nowhere to go for the rest of the film: a slower escalation would probably have been more satisfying. None of the above flaws are necessarily show-stoppers by themselves. The damage criticism, for example, could equally be levelled at the heroine in Revenge. However, they all combine to chip away at this film’s overall entertainment value, in effect leaving it doing the Hokey-Pokey: one step forward, one step back.
This is before we get to specific elements, like the performances. These are similarly over the place, particularly among the villains. Fortunately, North – who likely has most acting to do, since Purvis’s performance mostly requires screaming – makes for a pleasantly hateable bad guy. There’s some spectacularly bad CGI fire; the practical stuff is fine, with energetic blood spatter, and everyone selling each bit of damage with the enthusiasm of someone auditioning for the WWE. This momentum is sufficient to paper over some of the flaws, though it would be optimistic to say it covers them all, or anywhere close to that. But I am a simple man, with simple needs. Consequently, I’ll always look somewhat kindly on a movie which possesses zero pretensions and a large bucket of red-coloured corn syrup.
Dir: Rebecca J Matthews and Michael Hoad
Star: Megan Purvis, Aaron-Jon North, Hannah Pauley,