Fistful of Vengeance

There is a specific kind of digital dust that gathers on the Netflix "New Releases" tab—a graveyard of high-concept actioners that appear with a bang on a Friday and vanish into the algorithm’s digestive tract by the following Tuesday. Fistful of Vengeance (2022) is a prime specimen of this streaming-era phenomenon. It arrived not as a prestige theatrical event, but as a feature-length capstone to the short-lived series Wu Assassins. If you didn’t watch the show, don't sweat it. I didn't either, and within ten minutes of the opening credits, I realized the movie didn't particularly care if I was caught up on the lore or not.

I watched this while my neighbor was power-washing their driveway, and the rhythmic thrum of the water actually synced up with the techno-heavy soundtrack for a solid ten minutes, which honestly added a layer of immersion the sound mixers probably didn't intend.

The Netflix Disappearing Act

We are living in an era where movies are often "content" first and "cinema" second. Fistful of Vengeance is a direct byproduct of the pandemic-era streaming boom, a period where platforms were desperate to turn existing IP into "universes." It’s a strange, orphaned piece of media—too big to be a TV episode, too lean to feel like a blockbuster. It’s also incredibly diverse, featuring a cast that spans the globe, from Indonesia to South Africa, which is one of the genuine wins of the contemporary streaming model. It puts faces like Iko Uwais and Pearl Thusi front and center in a way a 1990s studio executive would have vetoed in a heartbeat.

The problem, of course, is that being "content" means the film often feels like it was designed to be watched while scrolling through your phone. The plot has the structural integrity of a wet paper towel, but at least the paper towel is neon-colored. We follow Kai Jin (Iko Uwais), the last Wu Assassin, as he and his crew head to Bangkok to avenge a friend's death. This quickly spirals into a quest to stop an ancient evil from re-forming. It’s the kind of stakes that should feel heavy but instead feel like a series of cutscenes in a mid-tier PlayStation 4 game.

Fists of Fury, Scripts of... Something

If you’re here, you’re here for the hands. Iko Uwais became a global icon with The Raid (2011), and his presence usually guarantees a certain level of physical poetry. Here, he’s paired with Lewis Tan (Mortal Kombat), who brings a more traditional, swaggering Hollywood action hero vibe to the proceedings. The contrast between Uwais’s lightning-fast Silat and Tan’s more deliberate, theatrical movement is where the movie finds its pulse.

The action choreography is frequent and unapologetically loud. However, the film falls into the common contemporary trap of "more is more." Director Roel Reiné—a man who has basically built a career out of making sequels to movies he didn't direct (Hard Target 2, Death Race 2)—is also his own cinematographer. He loves a drone shot. He loves a neon light. He loves a fast cut. Sometimes, this works to hide the supernatural CGI, which occasionally looks like it was rendered on a laptop during a lunch break. But other times, it robs Iko Uwais of his greatest strength: the ability to see the full, terrifying geometry of a fight.

Lawrence Kao provides the emotional glue as Tommy, though he’s often relegated to being the guy who explains the magical nonsense so the others can get back to punching. Pearl Thusi as Zama and Francesca Corney as Preeya round out a cast that is clearly having more fun than the script deserves. JuJu Chan, returning as the villainous Zan, steals every scene she's in simply by looking like she walked off the set of a high-fashion cyberpunk editorial.

The Reiné Aesthetic

Roel Reiné is a fascinating figure in this current landscape. He’s the king of "The Look." He can make a relatively small budget look like $50 million through sheer willpower and a lot of colored filters. Filmed in Thailand during the height of the pandemic, the movie manages to capture the humid, electric energy of Bangkok nights, even if it feels a bit like a tourism board ad directed by someone who just discovered the "Saturation" slider.

There’s a sequence in a biotech lab that is peak 2020s action: clean white surfaces, blue LEDs, and people getting kicked through glass that definitely isn't safety-rated. It’s effective, but it lacks the weight of the genre's greats. When someone gets hit in this movie, they fly across the room because the script says so, not because you felt the impact. It’s a movie that feels like it was written by an algorithm that had just binge-watched 'John Wick' and 'Big Trouble in Little China' at 2x speed.

Ultimately, Fistful of Vengeance is a perfectly acceptable way to kill 90 minutes if you’re a martial arts completist. It’s a flashy, hollow, occasionally thrilling example of the "streaming filler" genre. It won’t change your life, and it certainly won't replace The Raid in your heart, but it does offer a glimpse at the globalized, neon-drenched future of action cinema—even if that future feels a little bit like it’s being projected onto a screen you’ve already started to look away from.