Walter Hill's Revenger is not your standard issue revenge movie! (film review)

During the Hong Kong International Film Festival, I spend 

far more hours indoors in darkened rooms than usual ;S

Revenger (USA-Canada-France, 2016)

- Screening as part of the HKIFF's Gala Presentation program

- Walter Hill, director

- Starring: Michelle Rodriguez, Sigourney Weaver, Tony Shalhoub

Of all my Hong Kong International Film Festival screening picks that (already) had entries on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) and Rotten Tomatoes websites, Walter Hill's Revenger (aka Tomboy, and The Assignment) had the lowest ratings by far.  Yet I felt compelled to check out what its director has deemed to be strictly a pulp fantasy because it stars one of my favorite Hollywood actress and possesses a novel scenario involving an expert surgeon who exacts a revenge on the hired gun who killed her beloved brother that's so singular that many might be convinced that the idea could only come out of a deranged mind.

Sigourney Weaver is imperiously cool as Rachel Jane, a cosmetic surgeon who had her medical license revoked some time back and now, for a different transgression, finds herself incarcerated in a loony bin.  Deemed so dangerous that she has to be in a straitjacket when meeting a prison psychiatrist (Tony Shalhoub) she obviously considers to be her intellectual inferior, the disgraced doctor proves to have a sharp tongue, piercing stare and steely demeanor of someone you'd be most unfortunate to cross.

Without realizing he had done so, criminal lowlife Frank Kitchen (Michelle Rodriguez) did just that; and for his sins, gets turned by Rachel Jane into a biological woman.  Even with a significant prosthetic penis, Michelle Rodriguez doesn't appear convincing as a biological man but makes up for it with an eye-catching portrayal of an angry gunman trapped in a nubile woman's body.  

More than incidentally, I find it interesting that the men that actresses like Brigitte Lin Ching Hsia have played in Hong Kong movies tend to be on the refined side of the male equation but that in this Western cinematic offering, the attempts to emphasize male-ness looked to involve providing the actress with what unfortunately proved to be too artificial-looking chest and facial hair along with male reproductive organs.  Two other technical aspects of Revenger that I thought notable are its copious amounts of flashback scenes and use of voiceovers that, when combined, make it so that Frank Kitchen dominates the picture visually but it's Rachel Jane's voice, and narrative, which feel most influential.     

For the most part though, this is the kind of film where it's probably best not to overthink things and just enjoy the wild ride that's offered up.  In retrospect, I'm surprised that it wasn't part of the HKIFF's Midnight Heat program (even while having been accorded a late night screening slot).  If nothing else, it could show (up) the likes of The Sleep Curse that B-movies involving demented doctors (especially those with A-list actors and/or actresses playing them) can indeed be wickedly entertaining without needing to descend into the realm of the seriously distasteful.    

My rating for this film: 7.5