With a varied filmography spanning Frontier(s)‘ grisly New Extremity misery, Hitman’s video game gunplay and The Divide’s apocalyptic survival, French genre filmmaker Xavier Gens is no stranger to action, gore and vengeance. However, his time working with The Raid helmer Gareth Evans on crime series Gangs of London has clearly rubbed off on the director, because with Mayhem!, Gens delivers a full-tilt martial-arts revenger that kicks off 2024’s action offerings on a visceral high note.
At its core, Mayhem! (original title “Farang”) is assuredly simple in its set-up and structure. While out on parole, French convict Samir (Nassim Lyes) is attacked by faces from his criminal past and soon the model prisoner is on the run with a corpse in his wake. Five years later, he’s settled and surviving in Thailand with a wife, daughter and dreams of better prospects than juggling shifts at a local airport with bouts of underground kickboxing. Desperation drives him to accept a shady drug smuggling job from local crime boss Narong (Olivier Gourmet), and when that inevitably goes wrong, betrayal, tragedy and a seething rampage follow soon after. It all sounds derivative and cliched on paper, just another entry in the post-Taken post-Raid bucket, but Gens and the cast imbue the deliberately paced first act with naturalistic emotion and personal stakes that turn familiar beats into effective albeit contrived drama. Nassim Lyes is the lynchpin here, balancing furious physicality with a raw desperate intensity often radiating in steely silence from his eyes.
Nursed back to health by his kickboxing mentor (veteran Thai actor Vithaya Pansringarm, of Only God Forgives fame), Samir awakens as a man single-mindedly consumed by rescue and revenge, while Mayhem! gets to work setting a high bar for action movies this year. Gens and action designer Jude Poyer, working as the film’s choreographer and second unit director, apply all of their Gangs of London experience to Samir’s rampage. What unfolds is a kinetic ultra-violent sprint through Thai alleys and Bangkok brothels and dockyards, with agile camerawork shifting in sync with blows and crumbled bodies to enhance hard-hitting impacts. Each vicious encounter further establishes Lyes as one of the most exciting action up-&-comers, culminating in a final act drenched in cinematic savagery. There’s nothing like a good hallway fight or elevator fight to elevate an action movie and Mayhem! delivers both back-to-back, funneling its scrappy brawler brutality and bloody limb-snapping into increasingly claustrophobic arenas. Fans of The Raid’s wincing finishers or of The Night Comes for Us’ body-obliterated combat will be very satisfied.
In spite of its grueling gory hand-to-hand thrills or all the Bangkok underbelly grittiness, this is first and foremost a saga of a desperate father and husband, and Gens and Lyes never let the audience forget that personal drive behind the bloodshed. With intimate well-established stakes, dynamic choreography and action filmmaking, and Lyes’ compelling performance from his searing glare to pulverizing fists, Mayhem! cements itself as an early contender for 2024’s best action.
Photo courtesy of IFC Films
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