Thanks to the success of Taken, every male movie star over the age of 50 is destined to make at least one action vehicle fueled by revenge and masculine surety. In Acts of Vengeance, it’s Antonio Banderas’ turn. In this tight, straightforward thriller, the Desperado legend plays slick lawyer Frank Valera, who takes a vow of silence after his wife and daughter are brutally murdered. He refuses to say a word until he’s brought their killer to justice. That’s not a bad premise to hang a genre exercise around, but where Vengeance suffers as an effective piece of cinema, it succeeds as a state of the union on this weird, Death Wish-influenced template.
Vengeance moves at a respectable clip, opening with the somewhat tired nonlinear convention of a dope, inexplicable fight scene then flashing back to fill in the blanks. But if the movie speeds through the ballad of Frank Valera and his brisk transformation from David E. Kelley series leading man to MMA obsessed vigilante, it’s because the film isn’t pretending to be something it isn’t. This isn’t the Liam Neeson strain of Dad Revenge Thriller where the protagonist has real pathos and the ability to impress upon an audience a palpable sense of guilt or regret. Banderas is more than capable of leading one of those pictures. But this is a straight-to-the-point, barely scripted DTV excursion where the impetus for the violence is less important than the violence itself.
It doesn’t matter that Valera wasn’t a particularly present father or husband. After he misses his daughter’s talent show the camera lingers on the endless procession of “I’m sorry” stuffed animals he’s gifted his neglected offspring in the past, but that’s all set up. If those things mattered, they’d inform the plot beyond striking a match for a fire of meaningless brutality. There’s a brief period where Valera struggles with his loss in a regular indie drama way, by crying and drinking a lot. Then he starts going to cage match fights in bars, enamored with the beauty of pugilism. After that, a chance encounter with a pimp and his teenage prostitute sends Valera through the glass window of a bookstore, where he stops his leg from bleeding by using his leather belt for a tourniquet and dabbing the wound with a paperback copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, which he misreads as an excuse to stop beating himself up and start beating up strangers in the pursuit of vindication. Why become a better man when you can become a badass stoic instead?
The mystery of who killed his family is threadbare and incomprehensible, riddled with little plot stop gaps that exist only so Valera has a reason to beat the shit out of someone. Which is fine! For the most part, director Isaac Florentine stages action scenes with open framing and uncluttered editing rhythms for combat that’s clean, easy to follow and entertaining. But the final act attempts to circle back around into something like resonance instead of accepting its true nature as a visceral extrapolation of man’s inherent need to feel like the front of a VHS box cover. No film that features Marcus Aurelius quotes as chapter title cards should hide behind a feint of emotional honesty when doubling down on sensationalized mayhem will suffice.
The film’s biggest failing lies in its extensive use of voice over narration. Valera repeatedly states how he used to talk all the time as a lawyer but by taking a vow of silence his senses have heightened and it’s brought him inner peace. But he keeps saying that to the audience instead of Florentine letting Banderas’ eyes do the talking like they’re perfectly able to. A few bits take advantage of the “silent movie” hook, but Vengeance is still too insecure to show, so it repeatedly tells. Maybe if one of the movie’s biggest lines extols the virtues of shutting the fuck up, it might be a novel idea to pass that aphorism along to the writer.
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