Painkiller
4/5
Written by Luke Barnes
The revenge genre has been done to death at this point, we have seen every single take on, man loses family and then goes to get payback, yet this film managed to surprise me. I enjoyed how the film brought the opioid epidemic, a very distressing real world issue, into the narrative as I felt it shed new light on it and how it effects people.
Bill Oberst Jr truly can do it all, he is the standout of the film here and makes every scene he is in. I think the acting across the board is top notch, as a result the film feels more believable and the world more like our own, as you stop seeing this as a fictional film and instead see it as real people dealing with very real world situations, or at least that’s how it felt for me.
My one issue with the film would be that it did not know when to end, as such the final act drags on and on. There are multiple times in the final half an hour where it looks like the film is ending, but then it carries on and on. A tighter edit was needed.
Overall, there is still fresh blood within the revenge film sub-genre.
Pros.
Bill Oberst Jr
Shedding light on the opioid epidemic
The emotions and the character work
The violence
Cons.
The ending and the bloat
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Another Millennial Reviewer 