Message From the King - Fabrice du Welz (2017) Hope You Liked "The Limey."

When I started Belgian director Fabrice du Welz' "Message From the King," I could not help from being reminded of Steven Soderbergh's 1999 masterpiece, "The Limey" starring Terence Stamp. "The Limey" is a sort of art-house "Death Wish." It is a vengeance story fueled mostly by Stamp's stoic performance.

Jacob King's (Chadwick Boseman) entrance into Los Angeles is crude and abrupt.

He has come because his sister, Bianca, had left an alarming phone message and he flew in from Cape Flats in South Africa to make sure she was happy and healthy.

After beating his way to the truth about what happened to his sister, he finally goes to the morgue and finds her. Not only was she dead but she had been brutally tortured first.

Jacob goes straight into Charles Bronson mode. His ruthless cruelty does not seem to have any limit. Like Stamp's performance in "Limey," Boseman keeps his stoicism despite his savagery.

About halfway through the film, I was half-convinced that "Message From the King" maybe was a remake of "The Limey."

Jacob goes after lead after lead, obtaining most of their information cruelly. He starts with Bianca's neighbors and her drug dealer, Frankie (Tom Felton.) He orders each of them to give him what little information they have. His constant question: who do you work for? After all, their boss knows the whole story behind how, when and why his sister died.

The search brings Jacob to a charming but suspicious dentist, Wentworth (Luke Evans) upon whom he focuses his investigation.

Wentworth leads Jacob to big-shot film producer, Mike, (Alfred Molina) an unwitting accomplice. Wentworth had Bianca's murder orchestrated. Mike had just told him to 'take care of'' Bianca. And boy, did they. Why, we still don't know.

Now, Wentworth has figured out that Jacob is a threat. He gets two cops and gives them fifty-grand apiece to pick Jacob up and kill him. Fortunately for Jacob, these cops are no smarter than the rest of their ilk. He gets away, which is good because you can not just end a movie at the one-hour mark.


Now, it is time for a trip to the hardware store. It's a cliche, but it's a fun one. Jacob goes back to his hotel and he builds a bomb.

As it turns out, everything, the dentist, the cops and other thugs Jacob runs across all connect with Mike and his predilection for creepy-as-hell sex.

Bianca had seen something she should not have seen and she had in her possession a video she should not have had of her, her friends and Mike playing out his deviant fantasies. She was murdered simply because she had leverage on Mike.

Jacob confronts Mike at his home. He quickly kills him. Then Wentworth shows up, just ahead of all the lower-level thugs. All the rotten eggs in one basket.

All the pieces tie themselves together nicely and all there is left is to do is wonder what Jacob is going to do with that bomb. Gonna be fun.

I kept wondering why so few vengeance films are better than the barrage of others that follow the same formula.

Part of its success is, of course, a matter of how good the screenplay and direction is. Some people are talented and some are not. So many of these films just use the pretense as a starting point for their simplistic blood and violence. That is why most of these vengeance movies suck.

The other ingredient in the good vengeance movie recipe is love. "The Limey" worked because Stamp's character, Wilson, is not a violent man by nature and is motivated by a desperate love rather than sadism. Jacob is exactly the same. He is grieved by Bianca's death to the point where he goes against his gentle nature and explodes into a flash-bang of brutality.

Like "The Limey" and "Death Wish," "Message From the King" rises above most of the cheap pictures in the vengeance sub-genre.