Dean Cain, who is to Superman what George Lazenby is to James Bond, goes head to head (well, not quite) with ‘The Big Show’ Paul Wight in Vendetta.
We meet Mason Danvers (Cain), a Chicago Metropolitan Police detective, and his partner Joel Gainer (Ben Hollingsworth), during in a shootout with ruthless criminal Victor Abbott (Wight) and his brother, Griffin (Alex Paunovic).
Joel takes Griffin down, leaving Mason and Victor to face one another (although it would be more of a face-up/face-down than a face-off). As it turns out, Mason couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn — or, for that matter, a stationary seven-foot-tall, 500-pound giant taking ‘cover’ behind a flimsy railing.
Reinforcements eventually show up and they all gang up on Victor. Mason then orders Victor to “Get on your knees!” — presumably so that he can finally be able to look him square in the eyes.
Three months later, Mason’s boss has bad news: “a key witness has mysteriously disappeared,” and both Victor and Griffin were released “this afternoon.” A distressed Mason calls his wife at home only for Victor to pick up the phone.
Oddly, Mason got a heads-up only after Victor had enough time to arrive at the Mason’s home; surely someone up the chain of command must have known that Mason’s family would be in danger, and yet they decided to allow the villain a head start.
Mason hurries back home, but it’s too late; he gets there in time to witness Victor literally pummeling his pregnant wife to death. This scene is excessively and unnecessarily graphic; no other instance of violence in the rest of the film (involving exclusively male characters) is anywhere near as disturbing as this one.
Anyway, this results in a Se7en-inspired moment wherein Mason puts his gun to Victor’s head; however, unlike Brad Pitt, he doesn’t pull the trigger. If he did, Vendetta would be over a lot sooner (I should be so lucky).
Having missed the chance to blow Victor’s brains out, Mason instead goes after his brother Griffin, whom he murders in cold blood. Mason then calls Joel to the crime scene, and is arrested by his soon-to-be former partner. Thus, not only do Victor and Mason go to prison, but they both go to the same prison.
My first instinct was to assume that this had been Mason’s plan all along — but was it really, though? Mason could not have known that he would be sent to the same correctional facility as Victor, and in fact, it must have come as quite a surprise since, as we soon find out, it was Warden Snyder (Michael Eklund) who pulled some strings to have Mason sent to his prison.
Snyder was also responsible for getting the original charges against Victor dropped; why and how he does these things remains an unfathomable mystery whose most likely explanation is, ‘because it’s in the script.’
Basically, everything that happens after Mason and Victor go to prison together is an incoherent downward spiral where logic goes out the barred window.
I can accept that the prison is Snyder’s personal domain, and he runs it however he pleases. Then again, so many prisoners die in suspicious circumstances under his administration that this must be one of the few penal institutions where overcrowding is not a problem.
Do none of these inmates have relatives who come to visit them, or with whom they correspond, and who would be surprised by their suddenly vanishing without a trace?
As for Mason and Victor, they unsurprisingly have several run-ins while in the slammer, but none more bizarre than the first one, during which Victor pulls Mason’s tray of food to himself, alternately introducing the Kraków sausages he has for fingers in Mason’s lunch and in his mouth, after which Mason simply pulls the tray back and continues eating like nothing happened. Ew.
90% of Everything is Crap 