Darc(2018) Review

Darc is one of those medium/low budget action movies that has all the cliches you'd expect from a typical action movie. The movie focuses on a character called, who was the son of a prostitute "owned" by the Yakuza.

The movie starts with the young Darc walking through the brothel while reading a comic book called "Darc" where his mum walks. He's met by one of the other prostitutes there that treated him nicely, unlike his mum's customer, who he runs into a moment later.

Not much is said about the timeline but it is safe to assume this was somewhere in the late 80s or early 90s because, in the present, the young Darc is portrayed as a hardened criminal with past ties in the Yakuza. He's shown being processed out of prison in the present and is met by an Interpol agent with a problem that needs fixing.

According to the story, the Interpol agent played by Armand Assante got too interested in the activities of the Yakuza and because of that, they kidnapped his daughter and used that as a bargaining chip to keep him at bay.

The Interpol agent convinces Darc to help him get his daughter back by infiltrating the yakuza through a weak spot; the coldblooded and trigger-happy son of the leader of the sophisticated Japanese gang played by Sho Ikushima, who coincidentally, is the son of the unkind customer whom he watched kill his mum and made him spend the rest of his life as an orphan.

source

The movie had an awkward and might I add, a poorly scripted love affair between Darc and his neighbour(Dawn Olivieri), after getting out of jail. The movie was more about revenge than a rescue mission.

Darc, played by Tony Schiena was portrayed as a badass with supreme accuracy with the pistol, advanced mastery of hand to hand combat and proficiency in the use of a Katana. This is presumed to be skills he learned during his own time as a Yakuza thug; a part of the story that required some elaboration.

Darc also showed a soft spot for women, particularly prostitutes, obviously because of his mum and even spent the whole evening talking with one sent to him by the Japanese Yakuza. For a badass, he also hated drugs and narcotics but was shown to be happy to gorge a few beers and smoked regularly.

He was also shown to be a little bit of a good guy; particularly in the scene when he was out racketeering with the son of the Yakuza leader and subtly took a gun away from an elderly concerned season without harming him. He dropped the gun inside an aquarium in the shop and acted like nothing happened; presumably to save the life of the individual, considering the ruthless son would have caved his head in with a golf club.

He's the archetypical badass in the movie and after his cover was blown and his unexpected love affair was cut short by the hands of the very person he used to infiltrate the Yakuza, he singlehandedly took down the Yakuza using a Katana, a few pistols and quite frankly, pure luck.

It is unexplained how and why he'd survive some of the events that occurred; taking a bullet in the spleen, being cut a couple of times and then finally stabbing himself right at the end of the movie. Any normal human would die from those injuries he suffered but the low budget John Wick survived.

There were some good fight scenes here and there, although a couple of them seem pointless to me because they basically existed for the sole purpose of showing off his fighting ability, something we already knew.

For a budget movie, I'd say it did alright in the action/thriller part, and even threw in one car stunt. However, it had an underwhelming and very predictable plot/storyline like most action movies, to be fair.

source

I'd give the movie an AA rating because it was a decent action movie. Most action movies are quite predictable anyways and it would have had a higher rating too, if it wasn't for some of the cliche sequences during the movie. It's a nice way to blow off 1hr 20mins of your day, if you have that time to spare.

Rating: AA

The Moviedb link: https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/521647-darc?language=en-US

Trailer

Thank you for reading my review of this movie and you can also find me on;

Twitter

Facebook

LinkedIn