Farang

In the trailer for this film, the phrase "Awaken the beast" is repeated, but unfortunately for me, this beast took far too long to wake up. The first half is wasted on a lot of set up with only a couple of brief actions sequences, and that's far too long for me to wait. If it takes 45 minutes for an a 100-minute action film to get started, you've done something wrong. We get some useless backstory on the protagonist's time in France before he moves to Thailand which chews up about the first 15 minutes. Plus it doesn't help the reason for his revenge is at least partly his own doing. For admittedly good reasons, he get mixed up with a local crime boss, and so when the cause for his revenge is finally inflicted, I found myself feeling little sympathy for him, and that's rarely a good thing. By the time, things finally started rolling, I didn't care and shut the movie off and missed what appeared to be the best part of the movie.

Been awhile. The last film I saw from Gens was Frontier(s) some years back which was eye opening and fiersome. Fast forward, and here we are. He's done some "smaller" projects I believe since my indoctrination into Euro horror and thrillers, abd this one did not disappoint. All too familiar tropes won't work if you don't have the atmospheres, the cinematography, and in this particular case, the extreme violent sequences. So beware, this film was far away from the faint of heart, but he did pay over and above homage to some of the better directors in the subgenre---Takashi Miike, Perk Chan Wook and the more recent to join in this clan, Gareth Evans. It's bleak, it's realistic and graphic at the core of the violence. But when you have a solid lead protagonist---the violence comes through that character rather easily. It's a story of redemption in its infancy that turns on its heels into one of the best revenge films of the the past 10 years. Gritty, beautifully shot, and gripping enough to hold you, and even hard to look away when its at it most challengingly disturbing. Bring on the XG shark film...