Mayhem! Review: Xavier Gens’s Revenge-Fueled Action Thriller Packs a Generic Punch

The original title for Xavier Gens’s Mayhem! was Farang, a word that describes the main character’s status in Thailand. A martial artist and ex-con, Sam (Nassim Lyes) is also a foreigner, and a Westerner at that, having fled his native France. The title change is understandable, meant to reach the broader audience that might take interest in the film’s bloody revenge story, though it risks setting the wrong expectations. After all, long stretches of Mayhem! pass with little in the way of actual mayhem, especially in its first hour.

The film, written by Gens and Magali Rossito, initially focuses on Sam’s daily life after he’s released on day parole and does an honest day’s work at a construction site. But trouble soon finds Sam, and after a brief chase and scuffle that leaves one man dead, Mayhem! essentially hits reset and jumps forward five years. Now living in a Thai fishing village, Sam has a wife (Loryn Nounay) and an adopted daughter (Chananticha Chaipa), and works several odd jobs—from airport baggage handling to gigs at an underground fighting ring—with the hopes of scrounging enough cash to relocate his wife’s restaurant to a beachfront locale.

While efficient, these lackadaisical early scenes conspicuously function to establish all that Sam stands to lose when his world inevitably comes tumbling down again. But however routine, this scene-setting does manage a small semblance of dread. We’ve already watched Sam become a victim of circumstance, with the stark change in scenery demonstrating just how completely his old life fell apart. When he takes a job from a local crime lord, Narong (Olivier Gourmet), we sense that the film is about to barrel toward the consequences of this decision.

Once Mayhem! sets Sam on a path for vengeance, Gens finds himself within the violent wheelhouse established by his debut feature, Frontier(s), which belonged to the French New Extremity movement and was indebted to Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes. Likewise, the gritty brutality of Mayhem! draws heavily on Gareth Evans’s The Raid: The Redemption and The Raid 2—which is perhaps no coincidence, given that Gens directed three episodes of Evans’s Gangs of London. When the shit hits the fan in Mayhem!, the blood flows freely, and bodies are broken with pounding force.

But where Evans’s Indonesian action crime films are notable for their elaborate choreography, Gens’s action is less cleanly cut. Instead of balletic flurries, the foes in Mayhem! are dispatched with a few heavy blows: a head smashed into a table, a throat dragged over broken glass, and so on. Up to a point, the way in which the filmmakers don’t emphasize the precision of the action works to key us to our main character’s mindset, as Sam initially seems shocked at how quickly and decisively he can assert his will. At one point, a shotgun blast blows apart the upper half of a goon’s head, and the explosion comes so quickly that it’s difficult to tell what happened.

Mayhem! reaches its gruesome apex with an Oldboy simulator in a Bangkok warehouse and an inventive elevator skirmish, neither of which would feel out of place in another splattery action picture that samples the DNA of the Raid movies: Timo Tjahjanto’s The Night Comes for Us. But unlike that film, Mayhem! comes to a screeching halt when it’s functioning as a narrative delivery machine. In The Night Comes Us, new agendas are often revealed in the midst of some show of ultra-violence. By contrast, whenever Mayhem! makes any attempt at character building, it feels as if we’re watching a chintzy DTV movie, and as a result reveals itself as a run-of-the-mill revenge flick that practically crawls toward its preordained destination.