Sons of Vengeance (2005)

July 26, 2006

by Nathan Shumate

Written and directed by Victor Medina and Eric Montes
Starring
- Eric Montes
- Ryan Williams
- Daniel Lujan
- Stephanie May
- Marco Mendoza

I should be grateful when a movie comes along (or is sent to me) which confounds my expectations and propels me out of my comfort zone. Too many genre movies seem to be path-of-least-resistance pastiches of category tropes, and in critiquing them too many of my own reviews become deja vu-inducing crankouts containing the same observations, the same complaints, and even the same jokes. (No, this does not mean that I promise not to use “I wonder what this would go for on eBay?” as a caption anymore.)

So I should be grateful. But dammit… reviewing something unusual is hard. Bleating my mouth off at the same old flaws and cliches isn’t work; finding a way to describe a film that works on different levels than those I normally see is. Damn you, Victor Medina! Damn you for sending me this screener and bringing sweat and strain into my comfy hatchetman existence!

Making things worse is the fact that the plot of Sons of Vengeance is probably its least impressive feature. You know me; I’m a story junkie. I approach movies as vehicles for structured narrative, and although I may be momentarily distracted by spectacle, my two main concerns in any movie review can be boiled down to, How good is the story? and, How well is it told?

AAAGH!! Don’t let him eat my head!

In the present instance, the telling of the story is so captivating that it almost completely eclipses any consideration of the story itself. (Almost. Unless you’re a story junkie like myself, in which case, Welcome, clansman.) And even by the plot-centric standards by which Narrative-Firsters like myself operate, this movie is still a worthwhile experience.

Our protagonist is Vincent (Ryan Williams), a twentyish young man studying for the priesthood in L.A. Unfortunately, other members of his family have aspirations not nearly as high, and Vincent is drawn into the undercurrent of California-Mexico organized crime when his brother Joseph (David Ruiz) calls him in desperation. Joseph is in arrears $30,000 to (ahem) a non-federally insured financial organization, and his life’s about to be taken as collection. The crime enforcer Spider (Hector Fregoza) proposes a deal to Vincent: There’s a young entrepeneur moving in on the established organization. Joseph’s debt will be erased… if Vincent will kill this up-and-comer, Oleg (Eric Montes).

Hmm. I’m guessing that he really can’t see much, coming in out of the light like that…

In a nutshell, then, that’s the thrust of the plot: Vincent, hobbled by conscience but driven by blood, crosses the border into Mexico to find and kill Oleg. And it really is a fairly straightforward plotline; instead of adding suspense by twists and reversals in the narrative, dramatic tension is maintained almost entirely through the visuals, comprising almost a series of tableaus. And it’s not that the visuals are striking to describe; we’ve got shootouts, the dingy streets of (I presume) Tijuana, the drug deals and enforcers sheathed in their shells of machismo. Oleg himself comes across as an intelligent and personable sort, as if his entire organization were formed around the idea of making himself the Good Cop in contrast to his entire underling army of Bad Cops. In fact, Vincent almost loses his nerve when, while hitchhiking down to Mexico, he’s picked up by none other than Oleg himself, before he’s steeled himself for the deed.

Now normally I don’t get much mileage out of the romanticization of organized crime and gangland culture; urban barbarism really doesn’t evoke much sympathy in me. But in this case, Medina and Montes have somehow managed to infuse the atmosphere of the Southwest into their drug-dealer drama. There’s a dusty twang to even the most inner city locations, an evocative undercurrent that adds a spaghetti western anti-hero sensibility to the saga of 21st-century crimelords.

“Billy Jean — is — not my — lov-er”… Everyone, sing along!

Of course, in describing the straightforward through-line of the plot, I have to also bring up the major contrast to that straightforwardness: the big, scary goth bad-ass named Cameron (Daniel Lujan) who kills and torments other denizens of this lowlife world, mostly around the periphery of the main plot. I’d call him a subplot, but that would mean that Cameron’s actions show narrative cohesion in themselves. But Cameron’s role here is viciously irrational; he’s shown little by little to be a supernatural element, and his appearances and actions only ramp up the stylization of the main narrative almost to the level of magic realism. (Long-time readers may be astounded that I could ever describe a goth as “scary” and “bad-ass,” given my oft-expressed derision for the whiny self-indulgent attention-mongering of the goth subculture. Well, folks, here’s the secret to making a scary, bad-ass goth: Have the character, and the actor portraying him, be scary and bad-ass even without the goth detailing. That way, the pale skin, ice-blue contact lenses, blackened lips and heavy boots aren’t just the affectations of an adolescent-retentive whose greatest ambition is to shock suburbanites. Cameron’s so spooky he even overcomes the handicap of being saddled with the non-scary name “Cameron.”)

The script is best when it confines itself to epigrammatic bon mots, the verbal equivalent of the iconic visual tableaus which drive the cinematic narrative, statements like Vincent’s voice-overed line, “I hadn’t fallen far enough yet,” when he fails to kill Oleg at their first meeting, or Oleg’s pithy statement that “Blood is green in this town.” The script gets less successful when it tries for actual back-and-forth dialogue, or when (worse still) it tries to explain things. This is a movie that works best on a pre-verbal level, with the succession of images creating a cinematic narrative that can’t be rendered well in words. It works worst when the dialogue tries to tie up the plot threads at the end, relying on the actors to make believable a plot denouement that strains credulity. (You know how everyone turns out to be related by the end of the Star Wars prequel trilogy? It’s like that, but doubled.)

Looks plenty red to me, Oleg.

But what redeems even the patently silly plot machinations is the utter confidence of the visuals. The movie was shot on digital video and filmlooked, and the resulting imagery uses the resulting grittiness to so great an effect that it seems like a planned and intentional effect rather than a result of available technologies. The editing is similarly sure-handed, splicing the largely hand-held footage for an effect that is both immediate and stylized. And while I normally roll my eyes at the overuse of bombastic industrial and other “edgy” music in indie movies, in this case the choice of soundtrack complements the visuals perfectly; if I thought it would be taken as the intended compliment instead of a dismissal, I might even describe the movie as a ninety-minute music video, in that it captures perfectly the non-verbal narrative art that the best music videos can deliver.

The question asked near the end of the movie still is mostly unanswered: “So what does it all mean?” Because to the degree that the script tries to wrap up its narrative threads, it seems silly. But that mostly means, I think, that a narrative-focused fellow such as myself is looking for meaning in all the wrong places.

“Oh. Uh… love what you’ve done with the place?”