There’s a particular sound that reverberates in the mind when you realize that even your dependable genre heroes have begun to phone it in, a sort of dull, metallic clank, like the start of a fight scene you hoped would end differently. With Diablo, Scott Adkins charges in alongside Marko Zaror for a billed “assassin-laced redemption movie on steroids.” But what crashes onto the screen isn’t a revelation or even a sturdy brawl in the rain; it’s more like a day shift at a cookie-cutter action factory, misfiring on every cylinder except, occasionally, the one that relates to punches and kicks.
Let’s get our admirations straight: Adkins and Zaror—two non-Asian exemplars in a genre often content to be filtered through Hong Kong or Korean choreography, are strange, wiry talismans of sincerity and sweat. Adkins, once the scrappy British underdog of Undisputed and my favorites (Avengement, Debt Collector), remains a craftsman of the physical: his fists are articulate, his roundhouse kicks have punctuation. Zaror, the Chilean dynamo, has always brought diabolic elasticity and a certain jaguar danger; he’s Espinoza’s muse, as much as antagonist or antihero. When these two collide, the screen flexes. There are glimmers,fleeting, thrilling, of everything that makes niche martial arts cinema a little secret pleasure for those who bother to look past the Marvel machine.
And yet, Diablo strands them both in a wasteland of genre fatigues and hollow plot. As Kris Chaney and El Corvo, Adkins and Zaror are less adversaries and more victims of a screenplay that mistakes “straightforward” for “utterly disposable.” This is “redemption” as rote itinerary: a bloodless to-do list of betrayals, vengeance, and overworked lore that can’t bother to disguise its seams. Even the film’s best shot at emotional resonance, the furtive, life-or-death relationship between Adkins’ Kris and Elisa, the daughter who doesn’t know her own bloodline, plays out with the perfunctory flatness of a rushed subplot. Alana De La Rossa, saddled with a role that might have injected a little pulse into the proceedings, is reduced to a sketch: “daughter as plot device,” little more.
Worse, the movie, so intent on proving its tough-guy credentials, gives the genre’s most reliable audience-draw, that is, a string of high-stakes, high-inventiveness face-offs—shockingly little room to breathe. You find yourself counting, painfully, how many hand-to-hand showpieces you’re getting, and the tally is thin. For a film so obviously reverse-engineered to market Adkins and Zaror as brands of hyperviolence, the actual commerce of combat is doled out in staccato bursts, meager enough to feel like rationing.
Of course, high-octane fight choreography is the last place one comes for subtext or soul. Adkins always was less about Oscar contouring than about kinetic catharsis. And yet, watching him sleepwalk through another cheap international co-production, after last year’s merely serviceable Take Cover, you feel the gnaw of disappointment. He’s better than this. Or at least, as you’re forced to admit, he was never all that great, but damn it, he used to entertain. He used to matter, at least to a subculture reared on late-night video store discoveries.
Was Diablo ever meant to be more than just another bullet point in the filmographies of two physical poets of the straight-to-streaming era? One doubts it, especially as the director, Espinoza, pours more affection onto Zaror’s screen time and narrative focus, hinting at a creative allegiance that never quite elevates either man above the level of durable stunt-actors.
Diablo is not offensively bad, just stultifyingly generic, which is a greater crime for the faithful. The few fights that sing remind you why you keep showing up, but the rest plods, and the aftertaste is fatigue. Is there a future for Adkins as more than a footnote in the Wikipedia annals of direct-to-VOD action cinema? The answer, like the choreography here, is predictable, a little tired, and, frankly, deserving better company. Diablo should have been a punch to the throat; instead, it’s a limp handshake from men you once thought could break your nose.
