Last week, Eli Roth’s Death Wish was released into cinemas with all the subtlety and nuance of a sock full of batteries to the face. In the middle of a nationwide debate about the role of guns in American culture, Death Wish once again proves that Hollywood liberals are out of touch with the common man; they are bleeding hearts who have no connection to the realities of urban violence from their perches on Beverly Hi… Oh no, it’s about a vigilante with a big gun who kills criminals. OK.
In this remake of the 1974 Charles Bronson-starring classic, Bruce Willis stars as a upstanding citizen who turns to violence when his wife is murdered and his daughter attacked. No matter how, err, problematic the original film’s politics, it still stands up as a classic of the revenge genre. Movies about revenge, frankly, are cool, and revenge stories have held sway over audiences at least since Euripides started jotting down ideas for cool, vengeance-fuelled tragedies in Ancient Greece.
Here are the 15 Best Revenge Movies of All Time.
15. V for Vendetta
Do you want to know a cool word that sort of means the same thing as “revenge”? How about “vendetta”? And guess what, it starts with a “V.”
In 2005, James McTeigue and the Wachowskis adapted Alan Moore’s classic graphic novel for the big screen. Set during a dystopian future in which Great Britain has become a theocratic, fascist state, V for Vendetta tells the story of V (Hugo Weaving), a man who dresses up as Guy Fawkes to wreak havoc on the totalitarian regime.
The product of human experimentation in a bioweapons program (that was eventually used on British subjects), V has ample reason to wage his one-man war against the state. While V for Vendetta may not be the most subtle movie ever made about totalitarian politics, it certainly gets its audience invested in the outcome of V’s, er, vendetta.
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