Death Wish (1974)

For one brief moment, Charles Bronson's Dr Paul Kersey - an architect whose wife is killed and daughter raped by gangbangers (one of them a young and lanky Jeff Goldblum) - steps out onto a NYC rooftop and surveys the city from above, and this vigilante may as well be in Gothan in a mask and cape, or, come to think of it, perhaps he's more like Victor Zsasz because it's a pretty unpleasant, unrewarding, socially troubling revenge he metes out.

★★★☆☆

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The Amateur (2025)

Run-of-the-mill rogue agent stuff not made any more engaging - in fact, it is all rendered a bit daft - by the fact Rami Malek's hero is a hastily trained amateur - a data geek working deep in the bowels of CIA headquarters who takes it upon his pasty little self to track down and kill the terrorists responsible for killing his wife, in outlandish ways that are laughable given the smug way he glibly enacts these logically impossible booby traps.

★★☆☆☆

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I Saw The Devil (악마를 보았다) (Ang-ma-reul bo-at'da) (2010)

I don't mind ultra violence in movies when revenge is being meted out to those especially deserving of it, like in Harry Brown or Bedevilled, The Brave One or a zillion other bloody revenge fests, and for the first hour or so, that's what's on offer here when a secret service agent goes beserk, seeking revenge on a Korean Max Cady serial killer who has horribly killed rhe agent's pregnant girlfriend, but by film's end, when the secret service agent's very short-sighted plan for revenge has resulted in pain, suffering and death for myriad extraneous others and when so much depravity is on show - so much that the serial killer becomes just one part of a greater universal serial killer problem - the thrill of revenge becomes more than absurd: From Dusk Til Dawn presents a more reasonable, grounded world.

★★★☆☆

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Dead Man Down (2013)

Intriguing enough given its roundabout way of revealing its fairly basic plot, this revenge flick about a man double-crossing a gang lord wants to be an Infernal Affairs/The Departed action thriller with the epic-ness of Heat but the writing, which tries to squeeze romance out of a situation between a blackmailer and the man she wants to coerce into committing murder for her - writing which also has Noomi Rapace's character driven to murder because three red lines on her forehead destroyed her career as a beautician - is just too dopey too often for the action to be able to soar to Infernal Affairs/Heat heights.

★★☆☆☆

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The Equalizer 2 (2018)

McCall is back dishing out vigilante justice in not one but five concurrent missions that so overfill this sequel there's no room for any plot details - the reason people are being killed in the main storyline is because their names are on a list (and that is literally all there is to learn about the matter), and similarly there's no time for elaboration in the "Not Without My Daughter" opening scenes nor any detail offered in the overly-ambitious Woman In Gold side story that keeps interrupting the action; there's nothing much to know in the Dangerous Minds character-building side story involving McCall keeping a young man from falling in with gangbangers, and no detail (nor sense) in the Twister denouement in which a storm event conveniently evacuates McCall's hometown just in time for a bad-guy showdown, and finally, don't expect any elaboration of any kind in yet another episode, a kind of Promising Young Woman sequence involving gang rapists.

★★★☆☆

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In Order Of Disappearance (Kraftidioten) (2014)

The 2018 American remake of this darkly funny Scandinavian Harry Brown seemed to think the interest lay in the irreverent detail - the gangster nicknames, the odd bod characters, and the quirky relationships - and so ended up an unfocused Fargo mess while the 2014 Norwegian original includes all the irreverent detail but remains tightly focused on how the actions of a revenge-seeking everyman (in fact, a small-town Citizen of the Year), um, snowball and erupt a war between rival drug gangs, all while the everyman miraculously dodges bullets.

★★★☆☆

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Cold Pursuit (2019)

In the township of Kehoe in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, against a backdrop of five-metre snows and glacial waterfalls, a snowplow driver seeks grisly revenge on those responsible for his son's death, and as in Harry Brown - because that's who this unlikely vigilante reminds you of, a snowplow-driving Harry Brown - there's a grim satisfaction to be gotten from watching smug druglords receiving their comeuppance from an unlikely avenger, but the movie makes you contend with a snowstorm of Fargo-style detail -the background details and idiosyncracies of oddball characters - that for the middle two-thirds of the movie, sends the plot and fun into hibernation.

★★☆☆☆

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Harry Brown (2009)

When housing estate thugs murder his friend, former marine Harry Brown (played by Michael Caine), an elderly gent grown weary of the gangbangers' reign of terror and frustrated by the ineffectual response of police, takes the law into his own hands and his campaign of retribution makes this a captivating revenge thriller, like Get Carter on a pension, with harrowing scenes of drug den depravity and wanton youth violence helping to keep audiences angry and sympathetic to Harry Brown's vigilantism.

★★★☆☆

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The Foreigner (2017)

A man - Jackie Chan in a surprisingly harrowing, emotional performance - heads to Northern Ireland to take down the terrorists responsible for the explosion that killed his daughter, and watching this 60-year-old reconnoitre Northern Ireland, magic up the materials he needs to create weapons, move freely around Belfast and the isolated country estate of Pierce Brosnan's Gerry Adams-like First Minister, and take out waves of "Authentic IRA" thugs, is as fun as it is ludicrous.

★★★☆☆

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Upgrade (2018)

RMIT Melbourne film school success story, Leigh Whannell keeps his high-octane revenge thriller, an exceedingly violent sci-fi, surprisingly fresh for a movie that simply rehashes Robocop with Tom Hardy lookalike, Logan Marshall-Green, playing the victim of brutal violence that leaves his girlfriend dead and him a quadriplegic...until he is upgraded by a Venom-like technology implant.

★★★★☆

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The Count of Monte Cristo (1975)

Probably all film adaptations of Alexandre Dumas' classic revenge story, the roughly 1000-page brick The Count of Monte Cristo, need to abridge characters and subplots in order to fit something sensible into a movie runtime, so this entertaining 1975 made-for-tv adaptation needs to be excused for dispensing of one of my favourite of Dumas' eighteen chapter releases, the episode introducing the electrifying Luigi Vampa, leader of a band of Italian smugglers, and probably noone can blame the movie for letting the intensity of Edmond Dantés' love for Mercedes extinguish long before their very late reunion - there is just too much other stuff to cover - but can anyone forgive the movie Richard Chamberlain's Count's whitened and slicked back 'do or the poster's redundant hyphen?

★★★☆☆

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John Wick (2014)

John Wick's two-hour gun and knife killing spree, including a brief scene featuring a yellow bus and an extended scene in a hotel called "The Continental", is justified because someone killed his dog and stole his car, but if the bus had "Columbine High School" written on it and if scenes in The Continental occurred on, say, the twelfth floor of a hotel in Las Vegas instead, the terrible indictment on America's gun culture that is not the intention of directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch's ice-cold, low affect neo noir thriller, might dampen the dumb awe of fanboys who have driven demand for not just a number two but coming soon, John Wick: Chapter 3 - Even More Bullets To The Head.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Visit (1964)

Not the M Night Shyamalan thriller but also something of a garish fairytale, this is the 1964 movie version of Friedtich Dürrenmatt's 1956 tragicomic play about a fabulously wealthy woman who, like The Count of Monte Cristo, returns to her childhood home to exact revenge, but unlike The Count of Monte Cristo she makes her past and her motives crystal clear, announcing an unsettling proposition at a dinner party thrown by the town in her honour: she will give the townspeople $2 million dollars if they acknowledge the injustice she suffered as a 17 year old and kill Miller, the man who put her 'in a family way' before conspiring to run her out of town — money corrupts is the main message, put simply, but in light of recent real-life retrospective litigations, there is other food-for-thought.

★★★☆☆

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An Actor's Revenge (Yukinojō Henge) (雪之丞変化) (1963)

Full of fascinating Japanese culture references and mesmerising theatrical staging, this 1963 Kon Ichikawa movie is about a kabuki actor who plots slow, deliberate revenge against the men who wronged him years earlier and in that respect is like The Count of Monte Cristo but here the revenge-seeker fashions himself as a female impersonator.

★★★★☆

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The Count of Monte Cristo (2002)

Alexander Dumas' book, published in eighteen parts over two years, is the famous rollicking adventure thriller about one man's revenge served fourteen years cold; this movie version, cramming the book's 1000 pages into an hour and a half, does a reasonable job of telling the story but never has a hope of being able to convey the thrills or present some of the more extravagant details in such a rush without looking pretty corny at times.

★★★☆☆

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