Vindicta

The movie in general, and the ending specifically, are beyond stupid. But I like what happened to Jeremy Piven. That was nice.

Plus watching Travis Nelson in a suit for an hour and a half is a good use of anyone's time.

There isn't much more to say. It comes across as a C-story plotline in a WB spinoff of a spinoff of a spinoff of a DC television program. As if they scrapped the bottom of the barrel of comic characters and added dumb cops.

Think Catwoman's cousin's hairdresser's cop brother moves to Seattle and finds all the worst type of overly elaborate serial killers with goofy MOs. Then a Serbian AI bot farm wrote the script.

Yeah. Costumes were viewable though.

Vindicta is a revenge serial killer film. It follows the tropes of this genre almost to the T. It is heavily cliched and trite, both in plotting and dialogue. Lead character is a spunky, tough woman who is a paramedic following in her fire fighter father. Oh, and she studied languages in college, specifically Latin and Chinese. This is important because the killer writes Latin phrases at each murder site. (Oh she also speaks Mandarin because she was raised in China town. No reason for this other than one other minor character speaks Mandarin for her to speak in an emergency situation.)

Stereotypical characters abound simply to fit plotting and structuring of the film. So many elements of this film are contrived that they blatantly shout their message out of the screen.

Not hugely mysterious, so the ending isn't much of a shock. It could almost be a good drinking game given how predictable this film is. Though I wouldn't want to watch it a second time.

My Google Latin didn't come out as expected, but at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter, id quod est.

Vindicta feels like a meld of a couple of other movies, without their budget, डेयरडेविल (2003) and Elektra (2005) come to mind, as somebody else stated in these reviews. It does seem to be a bit of a mash, parts were good, others not. Writers Ian Neligh and Steven Paul were possibly not on the same page. That's just my opinion though.

Elena Kampouris was, I felt, miscast in this role, although she did have some credible parts in this movie.

David (Daniel Cudmore) wore this mask that only had two small holes for his eyes. His peripheral vision must have been crap and wouldn't have helped him on his killing spree.

Jeremy Piven was in this, and that's all I have to say about it, that's how impactful his presence was.

Anyway, overall, Vindicta had a chance to be good, but all it managed was average. I would recommend this, but with the above warnings.

Wow. Full disclosure, I couldn't make it through this. It honestly felt like a bad attempt at a parody of "Seven" but directed by someone whose background is in Nickelodeon sitcoms and has never seen the film. If you want to piss off Jeremy Piven in a bar, ask him about this project. Fairly early on (but not too long before I shut it off) there is a scene where they show a defunct theater marquee advertising Jerry Lewis' "A Slapstick of Another Kind," one of the worst wide theatrical release films ever produced. I assume it was a tip of the cap or a thumb of the nose to someone on the production related to that steaming present. In retrospect, it may be the best thing in the film because it makes me laugh that such a horrible picture would intentionally reference one of the few films it keeps company on the very lowest of celluloid rungs with. The best I can say about this picture is the camera is always in focus though the lighting is all wrong, along with its direction, script and existence.

I thought this could maybe (please) be a story of a clever serial killer with a grudge. More like Kevin Spacey in Se7en. It's not.

Worse for the plot line is having a pretty young paramedic who coincidentally speaks Mandarin and Latin and knows jujitsu...And nobody at all thinks to look up events from only 5 years earlier with this same building?

The irritation for me was the mix of dog Latin with quotes from Virgil's Aeneid, and, worse still nobody explains the inclusion of Ancient Greek gods rather than Ancient Roman gods in this Latin fest. Ancient Greeks spoke Ancient Greek. And they came well before there even was Latin. Ancient Romans spoke Latin. And they had their own gods.