For a decade and a half, Scott Adkins action movies have felt like the amuse-bouches of the genre: you don’t go for the movie itself, you go for that single, exquisite fight—brutal, fast, clean, then back to whatever sorry goulash the plot is serving up. But with Avengement, someone, glory of glories, has seen sense and decided to cook the entire meal out of pure, red-blooded Adkins. It’s as if The Raid was adopted by Guy Ritchie’s least photogenic cousins and stranded in the back room of a decrepit British pub. The miracle? It works, start to finish—genuine, knuckle-bruising working-class catharsis.
If most martial arts movies get nervous at the prospect of repetition—parading their heroes through a world tour of factories, rooftops, abandoned swimming pools, always searching for new window dressing to stave off audience ennui—Avengement parks itself in a grey sweat-soaked purgatory and insists you’ll thrill, and then thrill again, whenever four gas-huffing cons in prison uniforms start swinging at each other across a linoleum floor. And, astonishingly, you do. The sound of meat slapping is cranked to an absurd degree, chairs and tables splinter at a healthy clip, and the choreography holds its form through every round: steady, unshowy camera work that worships the violence without ever apologizing for it—there’s a musicality to the carnage, an old-school discipline that’s rare even among today’s direct-to-video action spectaculars.
Of course, you don’t just need fists and foley-artists; you need a lead who can make us care when there’s nothing but retribution left to care about. Scott Adkins, who mostly spent the last decade saving lousy action pictures from total oblivion, is finally gifted a role worthy of his stoic block-of-marble charisma. His Cain Burgess is no frothy Guy Ritchie cartoon—there’s none of the cheeky gangster-wit, only the bitter, sandpaper weariness of a man who has not so much fallen as been ground down, scar by scar, tooth by tooth (the movie never misses a chance to have Cain grimace through his collection of dental prosthetics like a macabre Bond villain’s trophy rack). Adkins soaks up the squalor and exudes a brutality that reads not as triumph, but as the only option left; he’s lost everything except the ability to mete out punishment, and that makes him weirdly, unexpectedly sympathetic.
If the film is “super sloppy, cheap looking and incredibly bone-headed” (and God knows it is, festooned by the usual digital grit and bargain-basement lighting), it’s redeemed by a kind of earnest, battered honesty. The plot has been boiled down to a knuckle-duster of flashbacks and bar-standoffs—operatic in its simple-mindedness, almost Shakespearean in how quickly it moves past even a suggestion of remorse or ambiguity. But there’s genuine feeling lurking in the structure; every Adkins monologue about how he “earned” the coat on his back or found yet another reason to abhor his brother’s cartoonish villainy lands with a thud of conviction. The violence has a rationale: Cain’s apotheosis from pitiable patsy to barely-human hurricane may be heightened, but the film takes the time to make you believe it, or at least believe that its hero believes it, which, in this genre, is all the miracle you can ask for.
The movie’s real pleasures are tactile: the crunch when a jaw collides with a steel stair, the wince-inducing snap when Britain’s worst step is introduced to an unsuspecting shin (if you’ve seen it, you know), and the surging inevitability as Cain punches and strangles and bludgeons his way toward revenge—not so much relishing the fight as accepting it as the only truth he has left. There’s even a lopsided little flourish at the end: the righteous redistribution of villain wealth, the final act of a man who’s only learning, at the last, that violence can serve more than itself.
Avengement is a battered, ugly, occasionally ridiculous bruiser of a film that—like its lead—transcends its low station through sheer, unrepentant conviction. Scott Adkins finally gets a showcase for what he does best, and for once, the movie itself is good enough to deserve him. In other words, the meat is more than enough. And you can have your pudding.
