What would you do if in the blink of an eye you lost everything you held dear? In the case of Harry Kane, he simultaneously broke while also beginning to plot revenge on those who caused his pain. Harry’s wife and daughter are tragically hit by the speeding get-away car containing five criminals escaping the cops after a heist job. They stop just long enough for Harry to get a good look at all five of their faces before their leader Emile commands them to drive off.
Five years pass, and Harry, still struggling with the immense grief he feels, has become recklessly suicidal; doing seated crunches over a chair with a knife fastened to it, peering over the second floor balcony inside the church he works at and dropping books to judge the fall, things of this nature. Con O’Neill excellently portrays the physicality of Harry’s utter hopelessness, with this weight of dreary listlessness just hanging on every movement he makes.
Harry finally gets a spot of hope when a private investigator he’s hired to track down any leads on his family’s killers sends him a message that he found something. It turns out one of the criminals has been doing drop offs at a pub, and with that lead Harry is eventually able to trail them to their main hideout where he gets to see first hand just how ruthless these men are. He realizes he is out of his element, but still presses forward, selling his wife’s wedding ring to acquire a gun and begins his war path as a vengeful angel of death.
It is here where I should point out one of the things that helps this film stand out from many of its recent revenge film brethren; Harry is not a skilled killer. In fact there are plenty of context clues here to hint that Harry never even fired a gun prior to the events of this film as he struggles to even open the revolver he purchased to put the bullets in, let alone cocking the firing hammer. Later on when he finally points it at a person for the first time he is an anxious, shaking wreck of a person too.
This is a refreshing change of pace for the genre in the wake of films like Taken and John Wick where the lead is a thoroughly established badass who could effortlessly kill people with anything, including pencils. As a result of Harry effectively being just “a guy”, this makes many of the film’s few fight scenes tense, brutal affairs, where both parties involved in the fight pull out everything possible not to die. This also carries over to Harry’s physical condition as the film goes on. We’ve seen revenge narrative heroes get injured over the course of their journeys, but not many have been as drastically hindered by their injuries like Harry is. If this were a video game, Harry would be accumulating downgrades after each boss fight instead of upgrades.
The plot is for the most part otherwise rather straightforward and shockingly brief. Harry has a list of people to kill, and slowly works his way through the list, with each fight getting tougher and tougher, until it culminates in a sequence where you don’t know if he’ll get out of it alive or not. There is a slight romantic subplot with his coworker, where both of them have previously lost their spouse and are still dealing with their respective grief, but it’s ultimately just a branch in the overall narrative to add some additional stakes to the main plot. Narrative wise, this is probably as truncated one could make such a film like this without it being a short film, and I feel it works to the film’s favor.
Visually the film is pretty standard but effective. For the most part it wouldn’t really be worth commenting much on because it doesn’t stand out much aside from the excellent execution of the fight scenes, which once again get my full praises and then some. There is an odd little sequence early in the film where there the choice was made to do a bunch of rapid camera cuts that they don’t really do elsewhere in the film and I just end up questioning what the reasoning behind it was more than anything, but that was merely a weird distraction in the grand scheme of things.
I will note that the film does play fast and loose with the physics of how the human body reacts to being shot, with everyone who gets shot being flung at minimum a few feet. Shotgun blasts in particular repeatedly launch people clear across the room in such a campy way that I am not entirely sure they were supposed to be comedic, but nevertheless I still enjoyed seeing it, even if for the potentially wrong reasons.
Acting wise, everyone handles their roles well, with my standout praises going to Con O’Neill as Harry Kane and Anton Saunders as Emile, for completely different reasons. Con O’Neill brings great physical acting to Harry, just absolutely selling the wear and tear on his body and soul, and while he doesn’t speak that often, when he does it is effective. Anton Saunders, on the other hand, is joyously over the top, bordering on nigh cartoonish, in his portrayal of Emile.
One thing that did genuinely surprise me in the film is the audio. Vengeance is Mine has no audible human speaking for the first 8 minutes, and the first line that breaks that silence is a mumbling phone conversation we can’t clearly hear. It isn’t until 9 minutes in that we get the first clear dialogue, and I greatly appreciated it, because it let O’Neill’s physical acting take center stage. The sound effects during the fight scenes really help sell the brutality of them too, with one death having an absolutely grisly sound that hammers home what is happening without having to actually show the gore.
Director and writer Hadi Hajaig has crafted a finely tuned machine of vengeance, and while it doesn’t set the world on fire, it was a highly enjoyable way to spend an hour and change of my time. I greatly look forward to what they have next.