Redeemer is your standard vengeance-is-mine tale with an above-average lead in Chilean fight choreographer Marko Zaror, the screen’s brightest martial artist most people don’t know about. Had he been born at the right time — say, 10 to 20 years earlier — he would have been a late-’80s action star in the ranks of Dolph Lundgren and Jean-Claude Van Damme. As is, he’s quietly making fight flicks that have yet to catapult him beyond a cult following. Most fruitful is Zaror’s collaboration with Ernesto Díaz Espinoza, who’s directed him in four films to date, all wild and most recently the one at hand.
As the savior of the title, a heavily tattooed and soft-spoken Zaror brings a portable altar and a knack for Russian roulette with him to a coastal town that effectively shuts down after the summer season, save for the drug cartels lording over its slopes and slums. While an American hustler (Noah Segan, Looper) pulls the strings, the Redeemer’s true nemesis is the grease-slicked goon known as Scorpion (José Luís Mósca), who killed our hero’s pregnant wife.
In structure, the film is almost mockingly repetitive: The Redeemer approaches a group of bad guys, takes them down with hand-to-hand combat and swift kicks that land with a violent crunch, goes away for a bit, repeat. (We must ignore the fact that his signature hoodie would impair his peripheral vision.) Espinoza casts these sequences in his flashy, ultra-kinetic style that revels in a veritable ballet of blood spurts, yet leaves one with the belief that an essential ingredient of previous efforts was overlooked; Redeemer lacks the metaphorical punchiness of their 2007 superhero story, Mirageman, and the zip of Mandrill, that 2009 tweak of secret-agent thrillers, and soaks in the well of self-pity a few minutes too long.
Zaror isn’t that good of an actor to pull it off; physically, he’s a stick of dynamite, and that is what he’s put in front of the camera to do. More of a sense of humor, which Segan provides in his every scene, would bring Redeemer up to Zaror and Espinoza’s usual level. —Rod Lott