Action movie insanity has escalated so deliriously during the past decade-plus—thanks to everything from Gareth Evans’ The Raid and Chad Stahelski’s John Wick to Jung Byung-gil’s The Villainess and Carter—that the bar is now set at absurd heights. To wow audiences currently requires a massive degree of over-the-top choreographic madness, and it’s that peak which Mayhem! strives to reach. A French import (in theaters and on VOD Jan. 5) which is primarily set in Thailand and assumes that country’s particular Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior-esque style of bruising combat, it takes its time—quite frankly, too long—to deliver the gruesome goods. When they arrive, however, they’re of a suitably gnarly sort, highlighted by the sight of a lone warrior stabbing an adversary to death with a broken forearm bone that’s protruding through his skin.
In Paris, Sam (Nassim Lyes) is in prison for a vague drug charge that’s only cursorily mentioned, the better to establish him as an uncomplicated good guy just trying to get himself back on track. On a day of leave, he receives a tryout at a construction job and nails the gig. Unfortunately, despite things looking up for Sam, he’s still being hunted by his past—literally, as on his way to and from the penitentiary, he’s hounded by motorcycle thugs who spit and scream at him about his ongoing debt to criminal overlord Farhat, who’ll remain, throughout, just a spectral name. In the second of these two confrontations, Sam takes off into an abandoned building, hoping to flee these anonymous pursuers. Instead, he winds up in a violent scuffle with one thug, whom he fatally kicks off an upper-floor ledge.
Five years later, Sam is living in Bang Chan, Thailand, where he’s first seen hauling in catches with local fishermen even though, as it’s soon revealed, he’s now employed by a hotel, driving patrons to and from the airport and escorting their luggage through an armed security gate. Sam resides with girlfriend Mia (Loryn Nounay), who’s pregnant with their child (or so a single line of dialogue indicates), as well as her daughter Dara (Chananticha Chaipa), a precocious kid who views Sam as her dad. Mia works at a nearby restaurant called Paradise and has ambitions to open her own place on the beach. Sam, meanwhile, is helping her earn enough money to make her dream a reality by competing in local kickboxing matches that—much to his coach Hansa’s (Vithaya Pansringarm) chagrin—he throws in order to net extra dough for himself and others, including the bouts’ promoter and Mia’s shady gambling-addict restaurant boss Sombat (Sahajak Boonthanakit).
When Mia discovers that she’s been outbid for her coveted property, Sam investigates and discovers that the obstacle in their path is French expat kingpin Narong (Olivier Gourmet). Upon hearing that Sam wants the property to be in Mia’s name (a legal stipulation, since Mia is half-Thai), Narong and his blonde-haired henchman Kasem (Yothin Udomsanti) laugh at the guy for being an emasculated dupe. To then prove that point, Narong forces Sam to smuggle drugs through the airport in exchange for the deed to the land. Alas, things go sideways when security guards pounce (out of the blue, as with so many twists in this tale) and Sam is once again forced to run. Before he can smuggle Mia and Dara to safety, Narong’s crew arrives at the family’s home, instigating a bloody fight that results in a tragic demise and Dara’s abduction. By miraculous means, Sam survives with Hansa’s aid, and sets about figuring out how to both locate the girl and exact revenge against those who ruined his life.
This is about as conventional as genre cinema gets, and director Gens—best known for his 2007 debut Frontier(s), one of the most notable titles in the era’s French New Extremity horror movement—orchestrates it with surprising restraint. Sam is conceived as merely a one-dimensional battering ram whose perpetually stern countenance conveys his frustration with a world that won’t give him a break, and the conflicts in which he initially finds himself are suitably muscular but unreasonably short and unimaginative.
In a contemporary landscape chockablock with films that feature outrageously extended and creative bouts of hand-to-hand and weaponized brutality, Mayhem!’s signature set pieces are, for most of its 99-minute runtime, decidedly humdrum. Sam goes toe-to-toe with enemies wielding machetes, hatchets and firearms, and he takes at least as many blows as he dishes out. Yet the throwdowns don’t last long, aren’t suspenseful or exciting (especially since they usually just pit him against two or three people at a time), and boast no truly unique slam-bang feats.
Although Mayhem! never goes long without some type of physical altercation, its desire to meld Taken with any number of Southeast Asian-flavored action efforts is undone by its reserved approach to aggro pandemonium. Only during its final passages does the film kick into a legitimately gung-ho gear, as Sam—following a trip to Bangkok that requires him to visit a ladyboy bar where he’s accosted by prostitutes, and a red light district brothel that specializes in young girls—tears into his adversaries with uninhibited fury.
That peaks in an elevator where, courtesy of three opponents, Sam’s limbs are repeatedly impaled by a giant blade and, while they’re in his body, he uses them as his own lethal tools. It’s at this moment that Mayhem! finally strikes a nerve, delivering the sort of crimson-stained nastiness that—considering its story is a bunch of paint-by-numbers nonsense that has nothing to say about anything—is its entire reason for existing.
Unfortunately, even after that thrilling clash, the film reverts to its prior enervating form, lowlighted by a climactic showdown between Sam and Narong in which the latter behaves so stupidly, strategically speaking, that he gets precisely what he deserves. By the time it reaches its predictable end, which is distended in a manner that’s all the more insulting given the brevity of its prior skirmishes, Mayhem! feels mostly like a squandered opportunity, no matter its brief instances of inspiration.
