FURY: THE TALES OF RONAN PIERCE (2014)

Directed by Kevin McCarthy, Starring: Michael McCarthy, Jordan Elizabeth, Wade Gallagher. Thriller, US, 2014, 91mins, Cert 18.

A vigilante cop seeking revenge for the murder of his daughter and the kidnapping of his ex-wife sets about exacting brutal justice on those responsible. Cutting a bloody swathe through an underground network of human traffickers, drug dealers, and organ harvesters, can he get to his ex-wife in time to save her?

This dispiritingly tedious attempt to recreate the neo-noir sensibility of Frank Miller and Robert Rodriquez’s SIN CITY flatlines right from the off with its jaundiced visual palette, its unremittingly grim misogyny, and its anti-hero’s rasping voiceover of inane cobblers.

It’s some achievement to make a film so packed with sordid incident, yet at the same time so dull as to render it almost unwatchable. Where to begin? Let’s start with the lead Michael McCarthy as rogue law enforcer Ronan Pierce. Grunting and screaming through one violent set-piece after another, he lacks any real onscreen presence to engage the viewer, and instead remains just as eminently unlikeable as the endless parade of scumbags he leaves slaughtered in his wake. Kane Hodder’s fleeting onscreen time is largely taken up with him relaxing in a strip club ogling pole-dancers (hardly worthy of second-billing on the DVD artwork). Jordan Elizabeth fares better as an initial damsel-in-distress circus clown (yes really) who turns out to be only too eager to torture an overpowered assailant with a pair of rusty pliers (albeit off-screen, in a rare moment of coyness on the part of the lead actor’s brother, director Kevin McCarthy). Actually, I would have much preferred a film centred on Jordan’s character, but that would presumably deviate too much from the film’s unerring machismo aesthetic where female characters are only either chained up or stripped.

Visually, the murky cinematography, filtered through a bleached yellow cataract hue, often renders detail indiscernible. Unfortunately though, the cartoonish speeded up driving scenes are all too visible (and risible) and as a stylistic flourish just fall flat. 

Is there anything at all to recommend this film? Well, you do get to see a man bludgeoned to death by a large fish – admittedly this is not nearly as entertainingly audacious as the piscine violence meted out in Spanish short FIST OF JESUS – but FURY doesn’t offer up much to reel you in.

*(out of 5*)

Paul Worts