My Name Is Vendetta movie review: Revenge is a dish served rehashed in Italian thriller

Language: Italian with Hindi and English audio options Cast: Alessandro Gassmann, Ginevra Francesconi, Remo Girone, Marcello Mazzarella, Sinja Dieks, Alessio Pratico Director: Cosimo Gomez A film called My Name Is Vendetta announces intent quite bluntly with its title. You don’t even need to catch the trailer beforehand to know it is a revenge drama soaked in blood and violence, and lots of kills. The film lays down the mood early on, with the hero’s voiceover quoting a line from Jack London’s The Call Of The Wild: “To show mercy was a weakness.” The obvious aim for Italian filmmaker Cosimo Gomez was to live up to expectations of hardcore action lovers although he throws in a good measure of human relationship melodrama, too, utilising the central duo of a father and daughter around whom the story is built. The Italian action drama, originally titled Il Mio Nome e Vendetta, picks the oldest formula in the textbook of filmy revenge, and the film’s story can be synopsised in a line: An ex-con loses a couple of his near and dear ones to mayhem that is a consequence of his criminal past, and gets down to unleashing brutal vendetta against those who destroyed his home. The makers have prudently signed Italian star Alessandro Gassmann for the job. To most action fans the world over, Gassmann is familiar as Gianni Chellini, the Columbian crime boss and antagonist of the 2005 Jason Statham-hit Transporter 2. Writer-director Gomez, however, avoids turning the drama into a one-man show. Instead of letting Gassmann get on with the business of revenge all by himself in a hero-centric set-piece, Gomez introduces Ginevra Francesconi as the veteran actor’s on-screen daughter. The idea adds youth appeal to the story and also leaves room for pervading emotional drama through the film’s runtime of 90 minutes. Francesconi’s Sofia could be the teenager next door. She leads a regular life somewhere in small-town North Italy and sure knows how to put up a spirited fight in a game of ice hockey. One day, Sofia innocuously posts a picture of her dad Santo (Gassmann) on Instagram, with no idea of the storm her action is about to unleash. Soon after her post is live on social media, a couple of men attack their home. Sofia’s mother and uncle are killed in the ensuing violence, and she is shocked to know her Insta post was the reason the men managed to track down their whereabouts. Worse, the attack, it turns out, was aimed at her father, and is part of a long-drawn process of vendetta going on for years. Santo apparently has a past connection with the mafia. He worked as a hitman for ’Ndrangheta, the dreaded Sicilian crime syndicate. Now, as her father sets out to seek revenge against those that took the lives of her mother and uncle, Sofia realises she must also walk his path of violence for the sake of justice. Father and daughter escape to Milan and plot the course of their revenge. Gomez and his co-writers (Sandrone Dazieri and Andrea Nobile) have prioritised inserting standard tropes into the screenplay, which aim at regaling action lovers than adding any fresh spin to the revenge drama as a genre. More than develop characters, story or twists, the writer trio focus on creating as much room as possible for stock violence and melodrama. The story — of a man, who once led a life of violence, being forced to involve his child in his brutal plan of action — is not new, though the idea to carry forward the plot of revenge using a father-daughter team would seem unusual. “Kill to not be killed,” Santo teaches Sofia, along with knife-wielding tricks, and by the time the film ends, the girl next door sure morphs into a cold killer. Which in turn is a clever way to open up prospects for a possible sequel, with Sofia helming a new kill-fest. On a different tangent, one recalls Eric Bana and Saoirse Ronan playing out a similar father-daughter bond in the action-packed 2011 hit, Hanna, but then My Name Is Vendetta — despite its fast-paced storytelling, brutal murders and spectacular stunts — lacks that film’s thriller quotient. For the emotional track to work, the screenwriters try creating spaces within the narrative for Gassmann and Francesconi to click as a duo. The two lead stars manage an odd chemistry as father and daughter, though better characterisation would have helped. A storyline that doesn’t seem too interested in developing characters with any sort of depth leaves little scope for its actors to impress. The characterisation of Santo and Sofia merely gives Gassmann and Francesconi scope to play out the cliches as action heroes, though the two stars do give the otherwise predictable film some of its best sequences. My Name Is Vendetta is a good enough attempt, but director Gomez perhaps overlooked the fact that the revenge drama as a genre has been done to death over the decades and the generic formula no longer manages to awe no matter how grittily it is served The need was to push the envelope and try something unconventional with the plot, which might have surprised the audience and helped reinvent tropes. But, forget the broader storytelling, even characterisation of the protagonists appear hackneyed. Gassmann plays out his weather-beaten ex-hitman, in search of a life of peace with family, with aplomb, just as Francesconi makes a feisty Sofia. Yet, watching them go you somehow get the feeling you have seen these character stereotypes in too many films before. The film’s technical team does adequately, although just like the screenplay writers the efforts of the director of photography Vittorio Omodei Zorini and film editor Alessio Doglione would seem driven by formula, as the mood shifts from the serene North Italy landscape to the sporting arena of Sofia’s ice hockey game to the gritty underworld frames that capture Santo’s ruthless stuntwork. Banking on heavy-duty violence and crime drama, the film is good enough as an action entertainer, though you would struggle to recall a single remarkable moment once the show is over. True blue lovers of raw action would have little to complain, though. My Name Is Vendetta piles up enough violence to keep them happy. For most others, revenge is a dish served rehashed in this unoriginal piece of work. Rating: * * & 1/2 (two and a half stars out of five) My Name Is Vendetta is streaming on Netflix

Vinayak Chakravorty is a critic, columnist and film journalist based in Delhi-NCR. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.