Tom Jolliffe on when vengeance on screen is shown as futile…
It’s a dish best served cold. Cinema has long held a fascination with revenge. As a sub-genre, the revenge picture still carries plenty of market appeal. Many actors over the decades, particularly cinematic tough guys, have made careers in dishing out vengeance. For the most part, the movie concept of revenge is simple. An unspeakable act of villainy needs a hearty slice of retribution. Our hero must venture into a dark place and seek revenge. Said revenge is often satisfying.
In the broadest sense, the most perfect examples of ‘satisfying’ revenge lie within Cannon Films canon. It might be Chuck Norris blowing up Richard Lynch with a bazooka in Invasion U.S.A to exact his revenge, or Charles Bronson blowing up Gavin O’Herlihy with a bazooka in Death Wish 3. Our heroes, or anti-heroes are deserving of a morally unquestioned dose of revenge.
These perfect examples of atypically consequence free revenge are the most simple expressions of the idea. It’s pure escapism. It’s fantasy. It’s an antithesis to real life. In reality the seeking of retribution would inevitably never be clean, particularly that of the violent kind. There are, after all, laws and consequences. Revenge in its nature requires obsession, one that in reality is unhealthy, symptomatic of pulling away from society, possibly becoming sociopathic. Those heroes Charles Bronson regularly played didn’t have a huge emotional complexity. Their goal was simple, but that doesn’t truly represent the complexity of real life, human emotion and our inherently contradictory natures.
So what of an Anti-revenge film? Occasionally cinema has sought to subvert genres. It’s good to see a flipside sometimes or a different angle to view something. There have been many examples over the years about the sheer futility of retribution. American History X explored this chillingly, essentially bookending the film with two moments of…