Cinemavenger

   The funniest, nastiest movie reviews anywhere.

A Vigilante

If I had a dollar for every time I've hit a woman, I'd be in debt.  If I had a dollar for every time I smacked around some ass nugget who thought it was cool to beat women, I'd have at least enough for a McDonald's value meal.  None of which makes this joke any less funny.

What do you tell a woman with two black eyes?  Nothing, the bitch's been told twice already.

Before you go all pitchfork and torchy on ol' Cinemavenger, think about marching the angry villagers down to Sarah "Sheath That" Daggar-Nickson's house.  She's the one whose feature film debut, A Vigilante, pimps out WAG (wives and girlfriends) abuse to give her predictably shitty, "indie" revenge fantasy a hard candy coating of social relevance and an unearned patina of big girl panties feminism.

Let's call a spade a spade and not hit anybody with it.  The only reason A Vigilante is getting released at all is because it stars hotter-than-the-merciless-peppers-of-Quetzlzacatenango Olivia "Gardenia" Wilde.  Maybe Wilde is a big Charlie Bronson fan?  Maybe it's some sort of backroom Tinseltown community service?  Maybe she shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, and Daggar-Nickson has the video?

When she's not having a panic attack, Wilde's Sadie is a badass, one-woman wrecking crew who liberates women from their abusers by beating the fuck out of then extorting the dickless shitbags into paying off their victims and disappearing forever.  This, it turns out, only requires punching a heavy bag for hours.  That and wigs.  Lots of wigs.  Like, a ridiculous amount.

An abuse survivor herself, Sadie is masterfully calculating one minute and utterly incompetent the next.  Kind of like Daggar-Nickson.  When Sadie's not playing Femequalizer for the "I walked into a door," crowd, she's still searching for the man who used to beat her - and that wasn't even close to the worst thing he ever did to her - before mysteriously disappearing one day.  When they finally reunite, he gets the drop on her faster than a tornado tomato.  That Sadie survives at all is more luck than learning, more coincidence than cunning.

Death Snatch, er, Snatch Wish, I mean, A Vigilante needs to get its ass back in the kitchen and fix me a turkey pot pie.

March 22, 2019