Montana - Rache hat einen neuen Namen

In the Revenge action movie sub-genre, "Montana" is a great protégé movie with compelling characters, a ton of growling (LOVE that! LOL), and great fight scenes.

I highly recommend it and hope you enjoy the morality. It's always good to see the bad guys get their comeuppance. There's a ton of cursing and some of the characters are major jerks. So satisfying when they get taken down. There is some time spent developing the back story on the characters so you care what happens to them.

The title is a nod to Scarface in case you the miss the reference. At first I thought it was set somewhere in Eastern Europe but it turns out to be London's East End. Bits of it reminded me of John Wick.

Montana: Gritty English gangster film set in London's East End. Drug pushers, bent cops,Serbian gangsters, a teen courier who loses £100k of the drug gangs money, a Serbian assassin. The assassin has a score to settle with the Serbian drug overlord and eventually takes on the teen as an apprentice. Some good shots of boys the training and of police corruption in sink estate. Hands chopped off, stabbings, shootings. Great shootout sequence in a darkened warehouse. This thriller keeps the tension going right to the grand guignol finale. No classic but well worth watching. Directed by Mo Ali from a screenplay by Jeremy Sheldon and Peter Lowe. On Netflix. 7/10.

This was on Tubi and looked worth a try- The movie starts out violently but with the main bad guy in shadow, then moves to a more current time and the same over-the-top violence occurring, but the bad guy is obvious.

There's a teen in the movie and it is expected that other teens will watch, but the levels and intensities of violence at the start is ruthless and unnecessary imo to establish that the bad guy is bad. He proved that when he wanted someone killed in his crew that was untrained and an easy mark. That's it- then the movie could have proceeded from there and worked great. The violence to Lars' character would have been better done in flashes of memory. Then teens could watch the rest of the film with various homage to Leon, John Wick, Karate Kid- and other favorites, i'm sure.

There are a couple big plot holes, esp the kid being trained so well, bad guys missing shots at nearly point-blank range, attempts at religion and emotional range- but the story is engrossing enough to help you get past all that.

Lars is stellar and made it look easy. For me, he came out of nowhere and reminds me of a young Lance Henriksen. I expect we'll see more of him in the future.

The story/plot is great, the script writing...not so great. Given what Lars Mickkelson had to work with in terms of his lines, he did a masterful job. I thought this was going to be a typical UK movie, but I was pleasantly surprised. The only thing typical of UK movies in this film were the gratuitous F-bombs, which I am not a fan of. I think it's just lazy script writing in my opinion. The action and choreography was well done. This movie is worth the watch, seeing an unlikely pair come together and establish a strong bond with each other, and somehow make it quite believable, which can be attributed to great acting.

I almost didn't look at it over the low ratings I'm glad I ignored them and watched it. The movie is 8 or 9 star movie not a 5 star. It's a must watch it's one of them hidden gems.