Independent Film Review – The Avenger

I do like a puzzle. Admittedly I prefer when I know that I’m doing a puzzle rather than just not being 100% sure what’s going on. I started watching The Avenger “A British action, gritty, style ‘TAKEN’ set in London and LA based on a true story” as it describes itself. The story is, undeniably, similar. A family go on holiday to Los Angeles. One evening Matt Hollis (Mark Harris) goes down to the off licence to get a bottle of wine. While he’s out some bad guys break in and beat Alison Hollis (Anna Nightingale) into a coma and kidnap Lara Hollis (Honor Kneafsey). Dad comes home, gets mistaken for the perpetrator by the police and goes on the run. 

Why does he go on the run? Because he disarms and incapacitates the responding uniformed officers.  As a result the officers back at the precinct assume he is behind the abduction of Lara. I mean to say, an innocent man would have stood and waited while the police sorted out what was going on. The rest of the film is taken up by Matt meeting up with an old special forces chum, Syan (Preston Douglass) and finding revenge as well as recovering Lara. Actually, in the scheme of things, Lara would have gotten off lightly. She was kidnapped to be sold to a childless couple whereas the other children being held were going to be auctioned off to paedophiles. 

Look What We Got Here…

From then on there is the usual running around, exploring clues, finding leads, punching and shooting people until we get to the end. Obviously I’m not going to tell you how it all resolves because, well, spoilers. I’ll just say that it did and didn’t end how I expected it to; some tropes were adhered to while others were turned upside down. As I said earlier, The Avenger compares itself Taken. Does it measure up? The obvious shortfall is the budget. I don’t know how much it cost to make The Avenger but I’m guessing it is nowhere near the $25 million that Pierre Morel had to play with to get Liam Neeson. The biggest difference is that in Taken Brian Mills goes from Los Angeles to Paris, but in The Avenger Matt Hollis goes from London to Los Angeles. 

Ironically, Liam Neeson has stated in interviews that the biggest misunderstanding most people take from the film is that Europe (and France in particular) is a place where young people are at a higher risk of being abducted by human traffickers. He has said that several American parents thanked him afterwards for warning them of the dangers, saying they would no longer allow their children to go an a trip to France. Neeson always took time to explain that the dangers were highly exaggerated for the film, and tells parents that they should encourage their children to get out of the USA more often.

Little Blue Eyes Gets The Prize

As The Avenger opens it has no less than five cards starting with “This film is based upon true events” before going on to say about California constantly having the USA’s highest human trafficking rates. There were 1,507 cases in 2019 of which 1,118 were sex trafficking cases, 158 were labour trafficking, and 69 were a mix of both. More details are given and the final card reiterates the veracity of the film by saying that the storylines are “Cases from the FBI which are public knowledge on the internet”. I don’t know if that makes it more trustworthy or more likely to be totally fabricated! I suppose the biggest puzzle for me was when was The Avenger made. 

What threw me was Honor Kneafsey’s Lara. I recognised her from when she played Jodie Dawson in Benidorm. In The Avenger Lara is supposed to be five years old and Jodie was, I think, ten years old. Those two facts are irrelevant because we all know that there is a lot of wiggle room when it comes to the perceived and actual ages of characters and Honor looked the same in both parts. The thing is that Honor’s run in Benidorm was from 2016-17 and she is, now, twenty years old. If The Avenger was made in the last couple of years then the majority of the budget must have been spent on moisturiser. Anyway, ignoring that, The Avenger was a reasonable action film which hides its low budget very well

Independent Film Grade: B-