AVENGEMENT

UK, 2019, 90 minutes, Colour.
Scott Adkins, Craig Fairbrass, Thomas Turgoose, Nick Moran, Kierston Wareing, Leo Gregory, Louis Mandelor.
Directed by Jesse V.Jackson.

This is a film about London gangsters. They are brutal people, behave brutally, involved in quite a number of sequences of brutal fights. It is a film which, despite its good intentions and some moralising, will appeal only to those fans of tough action films and British gangster films.

The focus of the film is a man called Cain, played by martial arts expert Scott Adkins. He is in prison, gets permission to visit his mother in hospital, arrives when she is dead. He makes his escape from the guards and spends two days revisiting his past life throughout London. He is initially shown going to visit his brother’s gang, drinking in a pub after seven years in prison, challenging the group to bring his brother to him.

In the meantime, the film is a collection of flashbacks, not necessarily in chronological order. By the end, the audience is able to piece together his life, his early life and involvement in his brother’s gang, his devotion to his mother, his snatching a a purse from a woman in the street and being pursued by the woman he stole it from, her pursuing and being killed when she is hit by a car in the street.

The film also shows his arrest, interrogations, being sentenced to prison where he is immediately attacked by a number of the prisoners. Over the years, he is set upon, enduring a lot of injuries, especially to his face, replacing his teeth with metal, disfiguring him with knives and a napalm equivalent. In order to survive, especially when attacked and fighting back, the warden sentences him to extra time, especially in solitary. He does a lot of training, eventually building up enormous resources of strength and fighting skills.

The flashbacks show him escaping from the hospital, going to his brother’s accountant and forcing him to change the brother’s account, leaving him a small amount but distributing the rest of the money to the over 100 people that his brother had victimised. Which means then that there is a kind of moralising in the story, Cain fighting with the group in the pub, destroying them, clashing with his brother, his brother’s death, Cain dying in the street with some satisfaction that he had done some good to those who suffered.

The supporting cast has a number of prominent British character actors, Craig Fairbrass, Thomas
Turgoose, Nick Moran, and Australian Louis Mandylor