Vindicta

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.

This movie is laughably bad.

It seems like it was written by the school age child of a big Hollywood producer or something.

Because I'm not sure how anyone could read a script like this and think it was a good idea to make.

It's literally that awful.

Whoever it was has been watching way too many marvel movies "for inspiration".

Neither the writer, director, or any of the actors in this film should ever work again.

Everyone involved in this travesty should be immediately blacklisted, going forth.

The actors are all very recognizable faces...but they put on some of the most half-assed performances I've ever seen.

I genuinely can't tell if they suck that bad, or weren't even trying.

But it's real bad.

Either way, I can never look at them with any modicum of respect ever again.

The whole thing is so poorly constructed...it's not inherently clear what the hell is actually going on.

There's definitely a serial killer on the loose...amidst widescale riots aimed at a corrupt police force...and a polyglot paramedic, that still lives with her father, and has a fluent understanding of latin.

But what the point of it all is?

Who the hell cares.

If I wasn't trying to watch every horror film made in 2023, I honestly would have shut this off after the first 3 minutes.

It, quite literally, has no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Actually...that's not entirely fair.

Because I genuinely couldn't stop laughing at how bad it is.

It's confounding to think that there's an employed idiot out there that actually greenlit this.

I'm not sure who that was...but whoever it is should be publicly flogged for their transgressions.

While the writer should be jailed indefinitely.

Because, you'd think it would take skill to suck this hard.

But they brought the suck here effortlessly.

1 out of 10.

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.

I'm writing this with 30 minutes left. The main actor knows Latin and it's a good thing she does because what else would they do to look up what phrases mean? Oh yeah, they could google it.

This movie is neither scary or entertaining but I took the time to watch it and I appreciate you taking the time to read my review.

Jeremy Piven and Sean Aston are in this, and they probably didn't realize what they were signing up for. The script is kind of a mess, I guess there are fire riots going on and the police are nowhere to be found, leaving a paramedic to crack the case.

I was going to watch a Jennifer Lawrence movie on Netflix and ended up watching this instead and I profoundly regret it, guess I'll start cleaning while this move finishes.

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.