For an action movie called “Mayhem!” and produced by the French outfit known as WTFilms, “Cold Skin” director Xavier Gens’ latest genre exercise starts off as a rather subdued affair that doesn’t seem all that eager to earn its title. An enjoyably hackneyed and machete-happy tale about an ex-con’s tragic first stab at a second chance, Gens’ Thailand-set foray into Gareth Evans territory is more than 40 minutes old before it borders on anything worthy of an exclamation point, and even by the time it’s over this slow-bruising riff on “The Raid” barely rises to the level of a low-key hullabaloo despite its promise of absolute pandemonium.
That isn’t necessarily a knockout blow against it. Inspired by his collaboration with Evans on “Gangs of London,” but aware that he lacks his colleague’s bone-crunching touch, Gens does his best to make the movie’s simple revenge porn of a premise into something more than rickety scaffolding for the ultra-violence that it eventually invites. That means spending enough time with our taciturn hero — played by French-Algerian actor and kickboxer Nassim Lyes — that we genuinely want Sam to move beyond a life of crime and kicking people to death.
It also means a first act more in the vein of a prison drama like “A Prophet” than a balls-to-the-wall beatdown like “The Night Comes for Us” (complete with a wise elder jail-mate who recognizes Sam’s inner sensitivity and encourages him to keep his nose clean). It means interrupting Sam’s parole with a nasty, not-at-all stylized attack from an old contact with unfinished business; an attack that naturally ends with our guy kicking his assailant to death in self-defense and fleeing his native France.
And it means casting one of the world’s greatest actors — Dardenne brothers regular Olivier Gourmet — to play Narong, the dangerous mob boss who lures Sam back to the dark side with a lucrative job opportunity when the two characters cross paths in a pocket of East Thailand some five years later.
If Sam proves especially resistant towards such villainous overtures, that’s because he’s trying to create a virtuous new life for himself with his pregnant girlfriend Mia (Loryn Nounay) and the seven-year-old stepdaughter he loves as if she were his own. But it’s hard for a fugitive ex-con to keep their hands clean in Bang Chang — or their feet, for that matter, as Sam has started throwing underground kickboxing fights in order to help pay for Mia’s dream of building a new bar on the beach. That might be easier for Sam than winning, as Gens shoots those brief and furious kickboxing fights with the same reluctance that his protagonist brings into the ring, as if “Mayhem!” were doing everything in its power to avoid the same violence that its audience has ostensibly come to enjoy.
Don’t worry: That will change.
As tends to be the case in movies like this, our fun starts when the hero’s fun ends. In this case, that’s when the Narong job goes south and his goons decide to tie up loose ends by killing Mia and kidnapping Sam’s stepdaughter. It’s only because Gens has displayed such sincere attention to the film’s characters — and Sam’s hope for a new start — that slitting a pregnant woman’s throat doesn’t feel like an egregiously grim choice in an otherwise seedy movie that boasts more impalings than it does lines of dialogue, and reduces the whole of Thailand to a lawless slur of Western stereotypes.
Standard-issue bedlam ensues, although the bloodletting remains a bit too sporadic to call it full-blown mayhem. Sam murders people with the tip of a giant knife while it’s sticking through his own leg (Lyes is already one of the few action stars convincing enough to pull that off). One henchman takes a shotgun blast to the face at point-blank range. The handheld camera follows every frenetic act of mutilation as if it were attached to the actors’ forearms, as Gens borrows both Evans’ regular fight choreographer Jude Poyer, but also his pointillistic tendency to isolate each individual act of bodily destruction as if it were a small dot in the mosaic of a massacre.
Fans of “The Raid” franchise will feel right at home, even if “Mayhem!” never approaches the operatic scale that made the fight scenes in those movies feel larger than life. The closest Gens comes is the Bangkok hallway brawl in which Sam dispatches the entire stunt team in one fell swoop after sweeping half the city in search of his stepdaughter, but the modesty of the violence makes sense in a movie from a director who’s more interested in flirting with a foreign genre than he is in elevating it to new heights.
Like his protagonist, the more horror-inclined Gens is in the market for a fresh start, and like his protagonist, Gens isn’t entirely able to leave his past life behind. But he, at least, has the perspective to realize that, and — to the bitter end — the most bruising moments in his latest movie retain the essence of the character-driven horror dramas on which he made his name. So while “Mayhem!” might feel like a bite-sized snack when compared to Evans’ 10-course banquets of carnage, it’s satisfying enough to sustain people as they wait for Evans’ “Havoc” to drop later this year, and it offers some flavor of its own along the way.
Grade: C+
IFC Films will release “Mayhem!”in theaters and on VOD on Friday, January 5.
