This afternoon’s first movie on Amazon Prime:
Olivia Wilde stars as a battered wife beating up and running off a host of domestic violence victimizers, for a small fee from their wives and girlfriends, while spending her spare time searching a large expanse of New York state woodlands for her MIA survivalist husband, who’s been a fugitive from the law since murdering their son during a domestic attack on Wilde.
Most arthouse Vigilante films end up providing a cautionary view of such violent behavior, emphasizing the negative consequences of aggressively taking the law into one’s own hands. The antiheroes in these films usually wind up either going to jail or getting killed at the end of the story, with the prevailing view being one of subtle disapproval or condemnation, i.e. “they became the very evil they set out to destroy”.
This film, however, doesn’t pass any such verdict on the title character’s decision to play Judge, Jury & Executioner (though she makes a principled point not to kill any of her targets, despite threatening some of them with death if they persist in hassling their battered spouses). This story ends with its central villain being vanquished, resulting in a happier ending for the heroine, both emotionally and financially. No cautionary tale here, that’s for sure.
I had two issues with the film. One, it skimped on showing the bulk of the heroine’s efforts at subduing her abusive-bully targets into submission. A couple times, we’re shown her first blow, but then the film cuts to minutes later, with her target now battered bloody and totally under her control. For this kind of movie, that feels like a cheat, depriving the audience of the usual satisfaction and catharsis that comes from watching cinematic bullies get their just desserts.
The retributive violence in a Vigilante/Revenge movie is what gives these types of stories a great deal of their emotional impact, regardless of what message the filmmakers hope to impart. Withholding from the audience so many crucial moments of the vigilante’s efforts has a neutralizing effect, keeping viewers sufficiently detached and/or frustrated to the point of emotionally tuning out on the plot altogether.
As audience members for this kind of film, most of us want to be able to root for the hero/heroine as they’re struggling against all odds to prevail against formidable opponents trying to dominate/exterminate them. This movie could care less about elicting that kind of response. It’s one of the most uninvolving vigilante/revenge movies I’ve ever seen.
The other issue I had was with the main character’s credibility as an ass-kicking vigilante, who’s also shown to be self-taught, no less. Olivia Wilde’s not a stocky MMA fighter with dense muscle and heavy bones. Most the guys she beats up are nearly twice her size and, what we’re allowed to see of her tactics, she overpowers these guys in hand-to-hand, head-on confrontations, with little to no reliance on weapons.
Yet this isn’t a stylized genre picture like Haywire, Point Of No Return, Salt, or, say, a Marvel movie, i.e. something clearly intended as disbelief-suspending entertainment. Quite the opposite. The film takes a low-intensity, ‘realistic’ view of its subject matter, yet stills dabbles in plausibility-skewering, morality-be-damned, violent wish-fulfillment, similar to what some of those old Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood movies used to catch flack for.
There’s a scene in A Vigilante where Wilde’s character is shown fending off three to four potential rapists in a dark alley as they attack her simultaneously from different directions. After a brief tussle with her, each of the men gets knocked down for the count by Wilde’s character with relative ease. The way this scene was written and choreographed, I just didn’t buy it.
Anybody with firsthand knowledge of fighting will tell you that it takes a lot of training and a lot of experience, not to mention exceptional speed, size, and/or strength, for one fighter to successfully defend against several attackers at once. It doesn’t matter if you’re male or female, the odds are stacked heavily in favor of the group over the individual in these situations.
In Road House, which was deliberately, enjoyably silly, not to mention barely rooted in reality, even Patrick Swayze’s character didn’t have it that easy when fending off multiple attackers who were bigger:
Worse, A Vigilante shows Wilde’s character learning her fighting skills FROM A BOOK…sort of like Daniel in The Karate Kid before Mr. Miyagi took pity on him. Why not just have Wilde’s character stand in front of a laptop, You-Tubing, say, old Van Damme fight scene highlights, and have her learn through mimicry?
It’d be on about the same level.
No sparring partners. No hands-on training with the unpredictability of an opponent who’s actively resisting your efforts. No wisdom from a live instructor who could teach you about things like transtioning to different techniques if/when your initial technique and approach fails. Nope.
Just have the character, who’s a novice at hand-to-hand combat, glance at a series of stills from an open book, then have her engage in a lot of of bag work, shadowboxing and situps. Then she can learn from experiences after she’s insinuated herself into violent confrontations with (mostly male) bullies.
Within no time, she’ll be Ninja Level deadly. So fearsome that none of these bullies she smacks around and bankrupts, via extortion tactics and physical threats, ever complicate things by retaliating in any way. That sort of thing never happens in real life. In real life, violent solutions to problems always wrap up to the satisfaction of the Good Guys.
Whatever happened to the dread Cycle Of Violence that Hollywood spent all those years warning us about? As far as this film’s script is concerned, it’s curiously MIA.
Utterly absurd, especially for such a heavy dramatic movie that, from beginning to end, takes itself sooooo seriously.
That said, I don’t want it to seem like I hated this movie. It did have positive elements that made it worth watching.
The acting in A Vigilante was first-rate and the most compelling scenes in the movie were those depicting group therapy sessions in the domestic violence shelter. Some of the women sharing their stories of domestic violence didn’t seem like professional actresses reciting scripted dialogue, but real people recounting authentic experiences of violent trauma at the hands of their domestic partners.
As I said, this movie doesn’t condemn its vigilante’s actions, but shows her efforts, ultimately, being rewarded, which I don’t really have a problem with. What I had a problem with was the movie teasing a plot centered on violent justice/revenge which it mostly failed to deliver.
On a side note, I have yet to watch this film–
–but, considering the stark contrast in critical response that Peppermint and A Fugitive received–
–not to mention the glaring difference in the box office take of each film–
–-I must say, I’m intrigued enough to consider checking it out, though the $12.99 price tag Peppermint presently carries on both Amazon and You Tube seems a bit steep.
Box office tallies notwithstanding, just take a look at the Rotten Tomatoes score for each of these recent, female-headlined Vigilante/Revenge films and ask yourself: Which one was likely made with Action audiences in mind and which film was made for pretentious critics and festival crowds?
“Lacks unique twists or visceral thrills“, eh? Quite frankly, that sounds precisely how I felt about A Vigilante.
Getting back to A Vigilante, the cinematography in the film was thoroughly uninteresting. Much of it plays out in desaturated color, at times nearly black & white. I had thought this dreary visual approach had recently begun falling out of fashion among contemporary filmmakers, but it’s holding on in some quarters, apparently.
I’ve grown to seriously detest this faux-edgy, desaturated cinematography style. It’s a lazy filmmaking gimmick, akin to Shaky-Cam, that can’t die off quickly enough. I mean, come on: If a movie stinks in all other aspects, it ought to, at least, be pleasing to look at.
A recent female-driven, lower-budgeted Vigilante/Revenge flick I did enjoy, which I didn’t find implausible or disappointing, or visually unappealing, and which can also currently be found on Amazon Prime, was M.F.A., starring Francesca Eastwood (yes, one of Clint’s daughters):
The main character in M.F.A. goes about her vigilante/revenge campaign with shrewd cunning and deliberation. Rather than studying a textbook in an attempt to become Bruce Lee and go head-to-head with her opponents in fisticuffs, Eastwood’s character instead utilizes her sexuality to maneuver her male prey into a vulnerable position before she attacks.
The various tactics Eastwood’s character utilizes to have her revenge in M.F.A. seemed risky, but plausible. By contrast, most the tactics shown in A Vigilante, (for example, the means by which Wilde’s character frees her wrists of duct-tape binds was distractingly implausible) and particularly the tactics which weren’t shown, had me feeling extremely skeptical.
Unlike what happens throughout much of the seemingly random, low-intensity plot of A Vigilante, the main character in M.F.A. finds each of her targets increasingly difficult to subdue and, uh, neutralize, which led to some extremely tense, dangerous, and nerve-wracking situations for the vigilante.
While M.F.A. is certainly what I would consider “arthouse”, its filmmakers demonstrated a firm grasp of compelling, inventive, and clever storytelling.
In M.F.A., the main character ends up being pursued by the authorities, which adds to the tension. In A Vigilante, the only real threat to the main character comes from out of nowhere during the last 30 minutes or so of the story. Unlike my reaction to the lackluster A Vigilante, I plan to revisit M.F.A. sometime in the near future.
At its core, A Vigilante plays like a vigilante movie for people who really don’t like vigilante movies.
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