Movie Review: Fistful of Vengeance

I remember being pumped for Netflix’s Wu Assassins. Taking the amazing martial arts master from The Raid movies and putting him in a TV show? How could that go wrong. But other than the occasional inspired fight sequence, everything about the show felt like a giant disappointment. Fistful of Vengeance continues that disappointment, sadly, making one of the best movie examples of a whole being way less than the sum of its parts.

The opening sequence introduces you (kinda, but not really) to Kai (Iko Uwais), a San Francisco chef who stumbled into superpowers and his designation as the Wu Assassin: an ancient force that gives a person superpowers. Kai travels to Bangkok with his friends Lu (Lewis Tan) and Tommy (Lawrence Kao) on a revenge mission. Warned by tech millionaire William Pan (Jason Tobin), Kai and his friends learn that Ku An Qi (Rhatha Phongam) the yin to William’s yang (his words), and also the queen of the Thai underworld, is involved in the murder of Tommy’s sister. Also, coincidentally, Ku’s underworld dealings have drawn the interest of others as well: Preeya (Francesca Corney) a well connected Thai informer, and Interpol’s Zulu (Pearl Thusi), intent on bringing the criminals to justice.

Martial Arts. Superpowers. Revenge. Criminal underworlds. Bangkok. Fistful of Vengeance recipe sounds delicious right? Instead, what you get is fruitcake, a horrible mixture of amazing things. The story goes the Fast and Furious route, opting to tell us, repeatedly, that these people are “family” without explaining why, hoping viewers have seen the TV show, I guess? We get the same arguments between the “family” when everyone isn’t fighting: Kai wants to go alone, Lu and Tommy complain about that, Zulu/Preeya roll their eyes at the boys. So how about the world building? The powers also really don’t mean anything, because people like Tommy and Zulu can take down supernatural entities, rendering them mostly vampire like. In an hour and a half, all the mysticism and culture is relegated to plot contrivance: this person gets superpowers because of this thing that isn’t brought up until the plot deems it so. The end explanation of the stakes was so convoluted I almost burst out laughing.

All of the problems above would be palatable if the actions sequences work. Fistful of Vengeance has a bigger budget than the TV show too, so I had hopes the money would go towards fight choreography. There are at least 5-6 fight sequences, and only 2 stand out, barely: one is on a Bangkok high rise, as the camera drifts between multiple characters fighting in multiple locations, and the 2nd is near the end, when the camera fixes on one character and rotates around as they fight a circle of enemies. Otherwise, the fighting was pretty bland by Iko Uwais’s standards, like a toned down version of one of his better films. We get a lot of the quick edits here, frantically moving the camera around making it easier on the actors but disorienting to watch for the audience.

Mediocre fighting mixed with dumb characters and incomprehensible world building? That makes Fistful of Vengeance a perfect Netflix “half pay attention” movie while you make plans to do anything else. Just wait till the fighting starts, and if you’re bored, just go back to texting. Wait, better yet, look up other films from Iko Uwais, and watch those instead!

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