Cannes'09 Diary-Day 5: Johnnie To's Vengeance review

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Hong Kong-director Johnnie To's Vengeance will probably get remembered for all times to come as one of the lowest points in Cannes Competition's history. A revenge drama screened today at the festival, it is such a poor piece of cinema content-wise that it evoked unintended laughter from the critics from the world over even at seemingly-serious moments.

The film no doubt has To's stylistic treatment, particularly his trademark choreographed violence that almost looked poetic in his previous film Sparrow, and some well-crafted action scenes, but it is the story and the script that ruins the film beyond redemption.

In fact, if such film can get into the competition at what is arguably the world's best film festival, and get a place amidst films like Jane Campion's poetic Bright Star, Jacques Audiard's Un Prophete and even uncharacteristically un-Ang Lee-like but interesting Taking Woodstock (leaving aside yet to be screened films like Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, Pedro Almodovar's Broken Embraces and Ken Loach's Looking for Eric), any film can.

The sympathetic selection of the film in the Competition might have something to do with the fact that it has been made with partial French money and stars French music icon Johnny Hallyday, but that cannot justify its presence amidst powerful works of cinema.

The film indeed starts off promisingly, with the hint of a philosophical touch about what revenge means to the complex human mind. It opens with the massacre of a family - comprising a Chinese man, his French wife (who is grievously injured) and their two children - in Macau. The wife's father, played by Hallyday, arrives from Paris and promises his dying daughter that he would avenge the act.

He employs three local hitmen in his quest to find out the brain behind the massacre at a place completely alien to him. One thing leads to another, and overcoming a brief period when he loses his memory, which later returns partially, he finds out the killer brain. But things soon start to go sour, with the film descending to the level of one of those B-grade Hong Kong action films devoid of much logic.

We have many films, of all categories, with violence at its core, but Vengeance becomes such a unintentionally comic and tedious journey for the viewer that even many of typical Bollywood revenge blockbusters would make a much better viewing. And Charles Bronson's Deathwish could be almost a masterpiece in comparison to this one.

It is hard to believe that this is a film from a director whose immediate past film is Sparrow, which made action such a pleasurable thing to watch.