A Vigilante (2018)

“A Vigilante” (2018) wasn’t a bad movie, per se, but it wasn’t good either. 
There was no component of this movie that can be highlighted - everything was just ‘meh’ in a way that made it even worse than average.
My first warning clues were the studios that made this: first was “Saban Pictures,” whose only other movie was the mediocre “Power Rangers” movie from a few years ago, and the second was “Movie Pass,” which was a failed startup attempt at shaking up how we go to the movies.

Sadie (Olivia Wilde) was a battered spouse who had managed to escape from her violently abusive husband. Her escape gave her a window to a new life where she vowed to fight for other people - women, children, men - who were all suffering from abuse too. It’s not clear if that covered the spectrum from verbal to sexual assault too, or just beatings, but I’ll accept ‘one step at a time’ for this.

The movie spent itself building to the climax where Sadie would kill her nameless husband. While it showed the other scenes of Sadie doing a number on her other victims (but explicitly never killing them), they didn’t show her beating the shit out of Husband for some reason. Ultimately she killed him - otherwise this would have been a pointlessly stupid movie - but they didn’t show what would have been the most important, and cathartic, scene. You could argue that there was enough violence in this, but for story telling purposes, watching Sadie threaten Husband and then cutting to the next scene of his corpse was entirely unfulfilling, even though he still died.

The first two thirds of this were told non-chronologically, which I’ve seen work plenty of times. Unfortunately, because Sadie wore many wigs (literally) and kept changing her makeup, it took roughly half of the movie for me to figure out that some scenes were flashbacks and not just cuts to other examples of her doing things in other getup elsewhere.
Well before the end I was able to piece it together in a way that made sense, which kinda helped explain why Sadie had become the titular vigilante, but that didn’t make the actual story-telling any better.
Even worse: if you edited this to play in chronological order, the movie would have been even more boring.

Speaking of boring: there were a lot of scenes of Sadie just staring. Into the distance, into a mirror, at a map, etc. I could understand once, maybe twice, but I stopped counting after the fourth time - there was no good reason for it. I’m 99% sure those bits were included for “artistic” purposes, but it seems the director confused “artistic” for “good story telling.”

In addition to Sadie’s stare-offs with the ether, there were also multiple scenes of Sadie sobbing. I was never confused about why she was sobbing, but only the first one felt like it had any narrative/developmental value; after that, they all felt like some back-handed way for the director to try to say some weird variant of “look what she’s suffered through, look how strong she’s trying to be!”

There was one particularly horrifying scene:
Throughout the movie, we kept seeing shots of Sadie’s abnormally long pinkie nail. Honestly, I thought maybe Olivia Wilde had a coke nail that the director didn’t make her cut before shooting. It didn’t make sense and it just existed.
Until the final scene, when she used that nail to slice the back of her own hand open to pull out a tiny blade to help her escape her restraints.
So... cool for being prepared, but that seemed like a particularly long-shot bet: she had to hope that being bound meant her hands would be oriented correctly and that whatever was binding her could be cut with a tiny blade you could hide away under your flesh for an unknown length of time.

The visuals weren’t particularly nice: much of this took place somewhere in run-down upstate New York. Even the scenery shots were all done during overcast winter days, so the scenes of nature weren’t great.

The soundtrack was almost entirely non-existent. There was some sorta-dramatic, vaguely tension-causing stuff thrown about, but otherwise this movie had a dearth of audio. There were many, many scenes of silence that definitely could have benefitted from some kind of additional audio besides the ambient noise of whatever else was on set at the time of filming.

I understand that this was a movie about abuse, and abuse is not a fun topic. It doesn’t make for ‘sexy storytelling’ or lend itself to cinematic dramatic outcomes.
Abuse is horrible and heart wrenching and can absolutely destroy someone and leave life-long scars, mentally and physically. The way this movie showed Sadie suffering PTSD from her abuse was probably very close to how real abuse victims feel - I’d be willing to bet this movie was written by someone who either had been abused or was close to someone who had.
I don’t want to pretend it doesn’t happen, or try to gussy it up by making it fun like “The Equalizer” (2014), but maybe movies aren’t the medium to do it with.
I don’t necessarily know how to make it a punchier movie without taking out the emotional impact of the abuse Sadie suffered, but the way this was told didn’t make for a particularly good watch either.

It’s clear that Olivia Wilde’s acting career isn’t going well, otherwise I doubt she would have been in this no-name piece, which is a shame.
I saw this on a plane, but frankly, I wish I could have read my own ClawReview for it so I could have spent the flight watching something else.
Don’t waste your time on this, even if you’re flying.