Since I discovered him in one of the most glorious and intense projections that I have lived in my almost 20 years attending the Sitges Festival, I have become A faithful devotee of the violent work and the wild miracles of Gareth Evans; Including that martial arts cinema cathedral composed of ‘The Raid’ and his sequel ‘Berandal’, his seminal ‘Merantau’, his peculiar scarce with horror movies in ‘The apostle’ and his incursion into the television field in the brilliant ‘gangs of London’.
This devotion, similar to that they professed for Faulkner in the Manchega Switzerland of ‘Dawn that is not little’, has not been at odds with the tremendous distrust that I have manifested in front of the premiere of ‘ravages’, his last film. A production that, despite having Tom Hardy as the leading star and aiming another orgy of death and destruction for demanding palates, has been marked by chaos and doubts.
The announcement of the launch of the tape, produced by the always interesting Xyz, by Netflix dates back to the past 2021 and, since then, has remained saved to the fridge of the streaming platform while has been subjected to numerous reshoots that invited fear the worst. The result has ended being far from the planned levels of devastation, but shows some bicephaly that invites you to think about a visions clash or a lack of budgetary vision.
The price to pay
Be it for the reason, it is clear that something has not gone well in Evans’ love letter to the Hongkonés action cinema of the 80s and 90s, than shows a huge imbalance between its two halves mainly reflected in its form. The first sample of this is found as soon as possible, with a driving scene that sees its intelligent planning and its agile assembly by one of the visual treatments underpinned in the poorest CGIs that have been seen lately in homologous titles.
This tonic is maintained almost exclusively until the arrival of the Mid Point to the rigorous 45 minutes of footage, smearing the solid staging of the Welsh filmmaker with plans and digital elements, and obvious extensions of computer -generated scenarios. Luckily, the change of airs that accompanies the central turn of the feature film, Open step to land much more polished and recognizable by parishioners.
It is from Ecuador when ‘ravages’, who dedicates his first measures to calmly develop the keys to his plot and to present his characters following the dramatic guidelines and the tone of the cinema to which he pays homage, It rises to offer a dirty, dynamic and ultraviolent blood bath That, now, it can be labeled as pure Gareth Evans.
After placing all the pieces on the board without hurry, but without pause, The director shows again his mastery of the camera and his sense of kinetics To mold three set pieces Long, tense and brutal – hemoglobin levels, which in Indonesia who saw their career are born are far from scare, are improper of the current Hollywood – in which choreographies are the main strut.
However, despite the fact that the melee combat that is usually associated with Evans’s filmography has its space – the physicality of the sequence in the disco is treated -, Firearms rise like the stars of the function; A peculiarity that, added to the urban premise with an unnecessarily convoluted war of bands and the power games, more sister to the film with ‘Gangs of London’ than with ‘The Raid’.
As I point out, to reach this apotheosic action of five holders wrapped by the aura of teachers such as John Woo or Johnnie To The price must be paid in the form of technical disruptions and, to a lesser extent, narrativesthat end up being compensated by an imposing Tom Hardy, which distributes Guantazos that gives pleasure and that builds its role over a character with an arc of surprisingly consistent redemption.
In one of the last episodes of Scptnotes, screenwriter Craig Mazin urged viewers to ask “what could happen” when something does not work in a feature film instead of discarding it automatically and moving on to something else. In cases such as ‘ravages’, this way of thinking, even if it does not throw clear answers, helps extract a much brighter gold than one would expect from what, a priori, it might seem another disruption of a Netflix that seems more focused on sticking its catalog of weekly news that in giving us polished and wrapped for gifts.
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