As most savvy moviegoers have known for quite a while, January tends to be a bit of a dead zone at the multiplexes—fully consumed with focusing on the award campaigns for their bigger titles from the end of the previous year or figuring out what to buy at Sundance, the studios use it as a clearinghouse for the junk that they have produced that they harbor no real hopes for other than the possibility that it might make a few quick bucks from viewers so starved for something remotely new that they will sit through practically everything. Last year, however, that tradition was upended with the arrival of Megan, the wild horror-comedy that defied the odds by becoming a major hit with both critics and audiences alike. Anyone hoping that the impressive returns of that film might inspire others to be a little more inspired in their releasing patterns during January, though, will no doubt be dismayed to realize that things appear to have gone back to normal again this year. Granted, I haven’t quite gotten around to see that movie about the haunted swimming pool yet—frankly, i have seen scarier-looking pool-based horrors in the form of a bunch of kids in an above-grounder who chose to get in too soon after finishing lunch—but I have seen the weekend’s other desperate looking genre entry, Mayhem!, a would-be over-the-top action film in which the extraneous punctuation in the title ends up doing most of the heavy lifting in a plodding programmer that contains plenty of blood, I suppose, but not much of anything else of note.
Sam (Nassim Lyes) is a French martial artist who has just been paroled from prison and is eager to put his troubles behind him and go to work at a construction site. Alas, a former associate is not so eager to let him go and, one deadly scuffle later, Sam is forced to disappear. When the story picks up five years later, he is in Thailand eking out a meager living doing a number of odd jobs to help support his wife () and adopted daughter (). When their dream of opening a beachfront restaurant is threatened by financial issues, Sam agrees, against his better judgement, to take a job running contraband for local gangster Narong (Olivier Gourmet). Inevitably, this goes sour and ends up (Spoiler Alert for people who have never seen a film before) with Sam witnessing his wife being murdered and the moppet being taken before being left for dead in a burning building by assailants who just assumed he was a goner. Turns out that Sam is not quite dead after all and, after the requisite healing montage, heads out to single-handedly track down the whereabouts of the girl and destroy anyone who gets in his way. Spoiler Alert—a lot of people end up getting in his way.
As a whole, Mayhem! is little more than a direct descendant of the mostly anonymous direct-to-video action fodder that used to clog video store shelves back in the day in the hopes that some extremely non-discriminating viewer might give it a chance lest they return home without anything to watch. As someone never exactly sparked to watching films starring people whose screen credit includes such appellations as “The Dragon” back in the day, I confess that I was about to give this one a pass as well until I discovered that it was directed and co-written by Xavier Gans, a French filmmaker whose past efforts have combined wild carnage with a certain cinematic flair. However, the results prove to be disappointing throughout—even if they can forgive the triteness of the whole scenario, viewers may find themselves put off by the fact that not much of anything really happens for most of the film’s first hour.
Yes, the action becomes pretty much non-stop in the last 40-odd minutes but while there is plenty of the red stuff on display, there is precious little inspiration to be had in regards to how it is shed. Gans eschews the kind of elaborate choreography that one might expect to find in a film like this but doesn’t replace it with much of anything of visual interest. The closest the film gets to standout scenes are the ones in which Sam gruesomely dispatches a group of assailants in a cramped elevator and then decimates a seemingly endless swarm of hapless henchmen in a long hallway and even in those cases, my guess is that action fans will find themselves reflecting on how much better the similar sequences were in such classics as Sonatine and Oldboy. Okay, there is one part where our hero dispatches a bad guy by stabbing him to death with the broken bone jutting through the skin of his arm—I don’t recall seeing that before.
As the vengeance-minded hero, Lyes makes for a reasonably convincing presence during the fight scenes (though he inevitably falters on the rare occasions when he is required to use his words instead of his fists) and there are a couple of amusingly icky moments here and there (particularly one involving a shotgun blast to the head that happens so quickly that it becomes comic). For the most part, however, Mayhem! is a mostly banal bit of hackwork that will struggle to win favor with anyone other than the most indulgent of action buffs. Even if you happen to be one of those indulgent types, you will have to admit that while you have probably seen similarly-themed movies that are worse than this one, you have almost certainly seen better ones as well. Too bad the producers didn’t simply take the money that they invested in securing the rights to that all-important exclamation point and put it towards a screenplay more worthy of it.