I started watching this film months ago on the bus back from Tempe to Phoenix but I didn’t finish it until today. Found via Netflix Instant Watch, what caught my attention was its cover of a man in a gasmask. Just recently getting off a kick of character designs with gasmasks like the Helgast from Killzone 2 or Jin-Roh soldiers, I was surprised that this movie was something else entirely(though a soldier is involved).

Richard, played by Paddy Consindine, goes on a killing spree after coming back home from the army. He’s hell bent on dishing out revenge to the boys who caused harm to his brother, Anthony, who is mentally handicapped. What exactly this harm is, we don’t know until the end, which turns out to be a very satisfying revelation. The gasmask ends up being one of his many scare tactics.

It’s hard to see at first how Richard is the good guy, or rather, the protagonist of the film with his methods of revenge, but by the end, everything he’s done feels justified. There are certain questions that pops up in regards to how Richard is managing to do everything he’s done. Sure, he was in the army but he wasn’t a special ops soldier as far as I can tell (not like he was doing Bourne action but still).

Nonetheless, the movie was great. It felt very low budget but the story beat out most high budget films that center around revenge. Consindine’s acting seemed a bit false at times spewing out some cheesy lines, but the rest of the cast was quite believable in the situations they faced. I could nitpick about the soundtrack a bit, how it sounded like it was intended for a larger film, but that doesn’t change my opinion of it overall.

4 out of 5