Vigilante Diaries

Acting? Bad. Writing? Bad. Directing? Bad.

This movie is so cheesy Michael Madsen and Eric Roberts were fighting over who would get a role.

There is no point in beating around the bush. This is a terrible movie.

It has big names in minor roles, but the main cast is actually one of the worst talent-less bunch I've ever saw. But by far the worst offender is Jason Mewes. I've never heard of the guy before but I'll be sure to avoid him in the future. He delivers all his lines in the wrong tone, evoking all the wrong emotions. Almost every second he's on screen is cringe worthy. Yes the writers wanted the character to be cringe worthy, but he's cringe worthy for all the wrong reasons, he's all over the place with his acting, or lack thereof.

The main hero / vigilante is your typical dull B action star, who fails miserably each time he supposed to show any emotion. Seems like a henchman level actor, who somehow ended up getting the title role trough some fluke.

And the story is a mess. All over the place. Out of sequence scenes, unexplained, confusing jumps in the time-line, that add nothing to the story or the drama. A prologue that does nothing to explain characters, and an epilogue scene which equally hangs in a void. Offering absolutely no explanation on not just the events in the movie, but you're left absolutely clueless even on what is happening in the epilogue. They even introduce a new character there. (Who is played by Trejo, so if you'd watch the movie because you're a fan of him, don't)

The action scenes suffer from lack of budget. Like they dump the G-Wagon because it's too expensive to do the chase scene with. But in the end they don't even smash up a single cheapo Russian transportation they switch to either. And even in this basic crash-less chase they manage to have some continuity errors. Like the bad guys vehicle changing from a different trim version of the same car from scene to scene. Gun fire is all done in post, so every car and person seems bullet proof in it.

Sound editing is terrible too. Some of the gun sounds are the worst I've heard on screen.

The only thing not messed up is cinematography which I guess could be called good, except for the shaky camera on action scenes, which some directors still can't leave behind.

All in all it's not the worst movie I saw, but I can't find any redeeming value in it. It's not as bad as the worst it could've been, but it's still very bad. Avoid it if you can.

Jason Mewes stars as vlogger Michael Hanover, who follows an avenger known as the Vigilante. The Vigilante (Paul Sloan) and his sidekick The Kid (Kevin L Walker) are feared for their violent tactics in taking down criminals. Hanover uploads their exploits on to the web and gets popular acclaim.

When the Vigilante takes on the wrong bad guy all hell lets loose as the dead man's brother goes after him for revenge. There are rifts with rivals gangs and shadowy US black ops types are hanging around in the background. There are lots of torture scenes, frenetic shootouts and hot looking bimbos. It is just that a lot of it makes little sense.

The film has good production values and some scenes are shot all over the world, bits of Glasgow with subtitles for people talking in a Scots accent, some footage in London and Armenia.

The plot feels disconnected and never hangs together. We get chapter titles making it look like that this was a Tarantino film and just to hammer the point home, we get a lot of bizarre talking from Micheal Madsen. As a violent action comedy, the story is not good enough.

Most actors feel like they are from cheap TV-shows. The bad guy must be telenovela actor. The script feels like it was written with mad- lips using action movie clichés. Movie is a messy mix-up of elements stolen form well-known action movie. Mostly from Deadpool, like lead actor narrating the story and fourth-wall breaks. Plot of all over the place and bad director makes this movie too both way too stupid for adults to watch sober and too hard to follow stoned or drunk. So I guess the target audience are male tween.

None of the characters are neither believable, interesting or funny.

Movie is not funny enough to be bad-funny movie. While this is not totally bad movie, it's not any way good either. Current rating of 5 is too high, this does not deserve rating above low 4.

You can't really "watch" this movie without at same time surfing on the internet looking for something interesting to pass the time.

First half of the movie was pretty straight forward b-action that worked pretty well, but then the second half just inexplicably decides to jump forwards in time one month, just in the middle of a crucial point for a couple of the leadcharacters.

And Michael Madsen without spoiling anything (I couldn't spoil it even if I wanted to as it's never explained) simply disappears from the movie, like literally he goes from being an important figure who just did something crucial for the plot to just never be seen again.

That's not really true he actually does show up in the last 5 minutes together with a person who died 10 minutes prior to that, so clearly that was a scene that was in actuality meant to be shown a lot earlier but I guess the editors thought that no one would notice and it somehow would make sense.

My only guess is that Madsen was problematic on set and he was fired or simply didn't show up anymore so that they had to put another character to take over where Madsen left off. And to be fair his performance suggests that he was barely trying to act.

Jason Mewes also randomly disappears in a crucial moment in the first half.

So yeah it was just all really weirdly put together, it's a shame because the movie had potential and it has a lot of entertaining standalone scenes and some entertaining characters (Rampage and Mewes most notably) but as a whole it doesn't make an iota of sense.