Mayhem!

In the trailer for this film, the phrase "Awaken the beast" is repeated, but unfortunately for me, this beast took far too long to wake up. The first half is wasted on a lot of set up with only a couple of brief actions sequences, and that's far too long for me to wait. If it takes 45 minutes for an a 100-minute action film to get started, you've done something wrong. We get some useless backstory on the protagonist's time in France before he moves to Thailand which chews up about the first 15 minutes. Plus it doesn't help the reason for his revenge is at least partly his own doing. For admittedly good reasons, he get mixed up with a local crime boss, and so when the cause for his revenge is finally inflicted, I found myself feeling little sympathy for him, and that's rarely a good thing. By the time, things finally started rolling, I didn't care and shut the movie off and missed what appeared to be the best part of the movie.