Revenger: L'ïle de la mort

I don't know why this doesn't have more reviews and why the lead actor isn't in more movies. This is one of the best action movies i've seen in a long time. Someone is dropping the ball by not putting Bruce Khan in more movies.

It's no secret that the best movies in the last decade or so have been coming from South Korea, The Yellow Sea, Memories of Murder, Burning, New World, The Chaser, I Saw The Devil or Sea Fog to name just a few. Koreans have managed to take every genre and make it original and above all, better. Every genre that is, except comedy, for some reason their and Asian comedies in general still continue to be situational rather than character-based, poorly written and overacted. Revenger is no exception, characters thrown in for comedic relief are cartoonish in the bad sense of the word, it's quite cringey, to tell the truth. The action scenes, however, are world class, superbly coreographed, played and shot. It's not a ground-breaking like The Raid 2 but it's very competent and a joy to watch. Is Revenger worth watching, by all means, it's a fun vendetta movie but there was potential for greatness there, with better characters and more polished comedy parts, Revenger could have been a masterpiece.

The story line wasn't well written, but if you're looking for an action movie with lots of fighting and blood spilling this is the one.

BUT the fighting scenes and the choreographic of all the Karate kick boxing, fist fight, knife and sword fights are among the very best that you could ever watched from all of such genre.

The leading actor and the amazing fighter in this movie is MMA Master, Bruce Khan. According to the short introduction of Mr. Khan, quote: "who as a 4th degree black belt in Hapkido, a 4th dan in Korean Karate, a 5th dan in Korean Kwal Bup, and a 4th dan in Korean Kyeoktooki. Bruce is a 4-Time World Champion Titleholder in the World Korea Hapkido Championships. Bruce has also trained with the Seoul Action School and Samo Hung's stunt team Hung Gar Ban." What a brilliant achievement of such a person in the MMA world!

Mr. Khan used his fighting techniques in many fascinating fighting scenes in this movie, but the screenplay didn't give him any dialog but just implemented his fists and feet to replace his dialog, which was more than enough for me to deem this absurd film quite worthy to watch. Those fighting scenes in this movie were one of the best choreographically arranged ones, like what we have seen in those films by Bruce Lee, Tony Yaa, Donny Yen, Wu Jing, and Steven Seagal. Fascinating, brutal, cruel, vicious, bloody....but absolutely GREAT!

A former detective gets sentenced to a prison island so that he can confront the man who killed his family and basically the entire island ends up dead.

Most of the points for this movie come from a few minutes worth of the film. In particular a couple of fight scenes, one of which included a fatality that I have never seen before, which always warrants some extra points. The non-fight scenes aren't really very good. There is a group of buffoons that I think are supposed to be funny, but it really didn't work for me, though, that it might be that it was just lost in translation. Overall, the story doesn't really make sense. The locations were good.

So being a martial arts movie, the fights are really all that matters. I did very much appreciate some of the full scene, long take action sequences. It is always nice to see compared to many of the closeup, shaky cam scenes you often get these days. Also, the actors are legitimate martial artists and it felt like there were some real impacts taking place. Unfortunately, most of the fight scenes were very one-sided and consisted mostly of dudes kind of waiting around to be hit. The exception was the two boss fights, which were excellent. Still, the action sequences were entertaining and makes it worth a watch. You wouldn't miss much if you skipped to the fight scenes.