Irish film-maker Chris Baugh’s engaging revenge thriller Bad
Day for the Cut (2017) immediately brings to mind the pragmatic, ominous and
fascinatingly low-key indie films like Shane Meadows’ Dead Man’s Shoes (2004)
and Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin (2013). The subject of revenge may be a
well-trodden one, but when presented with panache and compelling characters,
the path towards mayhem and murder will turn certainly bring forth solid genre
entertainment. While Bad Day for the Cut isn’t as tightly packed and fully
gratifying as Blue Ruin or other superior British revenge flicks, it elicits
enough emotional investment to keeps us intrigued till the end. The idea of
inescapable cycle of violence instills the narrative with certain hard-hitting
notes, in the vein of bloody Korean thrillers.
The film starts off as a simple social realist drama that
could have been cut from the same cloth as Lenny Abrahamson’s Garage (2007) or
the recent acclaimed drama The Levelling (2016). Reticent, middle-aged farmer
Donal (Nigel O’Neill) lives at his small Northern Ireland farm with his old mum
Florence (Stella McCusker). He’s happy to restrict himself to the confines of
the farm and limit his social life with a daily visit to the pub or repairing
some old cars. A local man sells Donal a slightly battered camper van in
exchange for some auto-work. He fixes it up and paints it in bright red and
hopes that he would take the wee adventurous trip to the beach with old
Florence. Soon, Donal sets upon a crossroads journey but without mum. One
night, he wakes up in the camper van to his mother’s screams and finds her dead
in the living room. He fleetingly sees a man getting into a car. The police and
neighbors think of it as a botched robbery. Immediately after the mother’s
funeral, Donal is visited by two masked tough guys. They take him to his garage
and attempts to kill him by staging his suicide (by hanging).
A glaring mistake costs the life of one tough guy and the
other one just turns out to be a frail, scared Polish boy named Bartosz (Jozef Pawloski), who’d been blackmailed to finish off Donal in order to free his
sister Kaja (Anna Prochniak) from the human-trafficking gang. The situation
leads to a darkly comic and relentlessly violent journey as Donal and Bartosz
first sets off to Belfast. The mission is to save the girl from the gang’s den
and also avenge them for mum’s murder. However, it doesn’t turn out to be that
simple. For one, Kaja isn’t at that particular place and since she is sold for
sex, only the gangsters know under which nickname she is operating. And, most
importantly the murder of Florence doesn’t happen to be a mere accident. The
ruthless boss of the trafficking syndicate Frankie (Susan Lynch) has deep
personal reasons for the slaying. She says Donal’s mum isn’t as saintly as he
believed to be. Nevertheless, Donal is determined to bring down the criminal
queen and save the victimized Polish immigrants.
Chris Baugh and Brendan Mullin’s script maintains a sense of
sardonic humor and diffuses credibility in the way the action on-screen
unfolds. The opening scenes are pitch-perfect which makes us root for Donal
even though his good-hearted nature is gradually taken over by his blood-lust. The
duo keeps looking out for the absurdity in the scenario rather than just stage
the actions in an adrenaline-rushing manner. For example, the scene they
interrogate the local crime boss in the woods or when Donal goes to rescue Kaja
and retrieve some key information in the process. Subsequently, the violence
here is absurd and messy, not cathartic as witnessed in traditional
revenge-thrillers. Of course, this non-conventional way of scrutinizing the
theme of revenge has been expertly done in the indie films I mentioned earlier.
Bad Day for the Cut is definitely riddled with a sense of urgency and
necessity. And there are brilliant dead pan moments, especially in the
interplay between Donal and Bartosz. But I didn’t for a minute buy the basic
revenge set-up. A middle-aged woman taking pains to forge meticulous plan of revenge for a father
she lost when she was five years old? No, the entire IRA backstory doesn’t have
any credibility or plausibility under the closest of scrutiny. Susan Lynch whom
I had mostly seen in benign or sympathetic roles (The Secret of Roan Inish,
Waking Ned Devine) makes a fine attempt to channel her inner-Gary Oldman. But
the character is often reduced to slamming, shouting and thumping that it
becomes very one-dimensional. But still Chris Baugh’s adept direction and Nigel
O’Neill exemplary performance as the flawed vengeful man (has a great knack for
deadpan deliveries) provides solid genre thrills. A little suspension of
disbelief is necessary to move through the second-half and Baugh rewards us
with an unexpectedly lyrical as well as distressing finale.
Trailer
Despite certain conceptual flaws in the narrative, Bad Day
for the Cut (99 minutes) is a fairly entertaining off-beat revenge thriller. It
diffuses strong emotional inclination to the proceedings which brings a more
measured perspective to the destructive cycle of violence.
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