Revenge is the cleanest motive in fiction and the hardest to end well. This tag collects reviews of films and fiction driven by revenge, what it costs the avenger, and what the story does once the target is reached.
CrimeEvery vigilante and revenge film reviewed on this site, ranked. Bronson across five films and twenty years, Seagal in his early-nineties peak, the Punisher three separate times, and a genre that is always arguing with itself about whether it approves.
1980sMs. 45 (1981) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Abel Ferrara made a rape-revenge film with a mute protagonist, almost no dialogue and a budget of around sixty thousand dollars, and Zoe Lund's performance is better than…
1980sAvenging Angel (1985) rates 3 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The sequel recast its lead, aged the character to university student, and converted a squalid character piece into a revenge picture with a real estate conspiracy. It is…
1990s8MM (1999) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Joel Schumacher directing Andrew Kevin Walker's script about a private investigator tracing a snuff film, with Nicolas Cage restrained and Joaquin Phoenix excellent, undone by a third act that…
2020sBlack Adam (2022) rates 3 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Dwayne Johnson spent fifteen years getting this made, declared that the hierarchy of power in the DC universe was about to change, and the studio he was in…
2020sAquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023) rates 2 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The last film of a continuity that had already been cancelled, released into an audience that knew it, with a villain whose plan is to…
2020sFast X (2023) rates 2 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The tenth entry in a series that began with a film about stealing DVD players, costing around three hundred and forty million dollars, ending on a cliffhanger, and…
2010sPrisoners (2013) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two girls disappear on Thanksgiving and one of their fathers abducts and tortures the man he believes responsible. Roger Deakins shot it, Villeneuve directed it, and the film refuses…
1960sTrue Grit (1969) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. John Wayne finally won an Oscar for playing a fat, drunk, one-eyed marshal who shoots men in the back, and the performance works because he is willing to…
1970sThe Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A revenge Western that abandons the revenge about halfway through and becomes a film about a man accumulating a family he keeps trying to leave behind.…
2010sThe Magnificent Seven (2016) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Antoine Fuqua takes the same structure, casts it the way the American West really looked, and gives the villain a coherent economic argument. The last forty minutes…
2000sOpen Range (2003) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Costner directed a slow, patient Western about two cattlemen who decide to kill a rancher, and then staged the best gunfight in the genre's last forty years. It…
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