Mein Name Ist Vendetta

"To kill or be killed. This is the law. Showing mercy is just a sign of weakness. It's a lesson I wish I could forget." Santo (Alessandro Gassmann)

In My Name is Vendetta, you can transport the manic spirit of Taken to Milan by way of Sicily, and you have your father, daughter fix mixed with the Sicilian Mafia. Violent action does not get better than this with Santo and young daughter Sofia (Ginevra Francesconi) on the run and running to revenge on a Sicilian Mafia that slaughtered his brother and wife.

It's not as stylized as Kill Bill or John Wick, but it has a familial charm with good camera and lighting work.

While you can see immediately this is not one of my usual art films; it is rather a thriller with the popular American motif of family reconciliation prevalent today in our super-hero films and family dramas. Netflix gives you a holiday retreat from goody-goody to exercise your natural instinct at self-preservation with naughty on the side.

It's a smart, bloody business emphasizing the central role now occupied by smart-phone technology. Facial recognition propels the action as bad guys can find good guys by connecting photos from your phone to your current location if you should be foolish enough to snap one when your dad warned you against taking it.

So the tech goes as everybody tracks everybody to lead to a final confrontation between Santo and Mafia boss, Angelo (Remo Girone). Sofia, with better-than-middlin' action skills, participates to bring home the sweetness between father and daughter and exciting action tropes.

My name is Vendetta (a descriptive title if there ever was one) is simply good old-fashioned revenge thrills set in a Euro-trash world whose menace is better because we watch from the safety of our homes.

Just remember, your phone is ever the willing partner in crime.

Netflix knows.

This is a decent foreign thriller about a defected Mafia hitman who resurfaces due to a happenstance of his attempt to lead an anonymous new life. When the Mob discovers he is alive they come after him, and his family, seeking to kill them. Of course it is not that simple. He is not an easy man to kill. Accompanied by his surviving daughter he seeks to finish what he started years earlier. There is a slight similarity in this film, to The Professional, with Jean Renault and Natalie Portman; however, this one is not as good. There is decent action. The cast is decent enough and the cinematography is good. Decent enough, but not the best.

To enjoy this, fully suspend disbelief and be a fan of the John Wick series. Without spoiling the plot, let's just say that the script is highly inconsistent in terms of basic plot points.

For example, are you high tech (face recognition) or low tech (phone tracing)? Are you heavily guarded, or not a guard in sight?

What's good though are the action scenes and acting, given the weak material and dialogue. Ended up being invested to the end, thanks in part to the short runtime.

Overall, a decent entry into the mindless revenge category, with a more plausible motivation than "you killed my dog".

Violent, brutal, bloody, not for the squeamish this Italian crime film where a former Ndrangheta goon is searched by his family for whom blood lines are more important than anything else. A revenge topic, already seen ten millions times before but that will please action movies goers. Not for intellectuals either, not a complicated story, with pretty good moments, and a very good directing, camera work, overall atmosphere. Clichés galore, if you seek surprises, watch something else. But it's better that this kind of topic is told by Italian than by Americans, the end would not have been the same at all from Hollywood. Good stuff.

The creators of this film took every cliche' of the "revenge" genre, mixed everything in a blender and pieced them together at random.

The daughter was made to look and act like Natalie Portman in "Leon", minus the acting skills.

Completely unoriginal and uninspiring dialogs, one dimensional characters, ultra predictable storyline.

It's a pity, because Alessandro Gassmann is a great actor with a lifelong acting experience, but in this film he could have been replaced by any mediocre actor and the result would have been the same.

The only positive I could find, was the stunning shooting location in the mountains of SouthTyrol, the German speaking province in the north of Italy.