by Ed Travis
I got suckered. I’d like to think it happens to us all sometimes, but then again, “all” of us don’t show interest when a movie stars not just Scott Adkins, but also 21 Jump Street’s Dustin Nguyen, Gary Daniels, and Kane Kosugi.
It isn’t so much that I got suckered into watching this because I thought (or at least hoped) that it was indeed a Scott Adkins movie (it isn’t), but rather that I thought, based on the aforementioned cast, that this would be an action movie. It isn’t. Instead it’s a boring slog through urban underbellies, looking for the killers of a dead girl that everyone seems to have loved, but which the audience has no connection to at all.
Nguyen is center stage here as a former Black Ops-type guy who kills indiscriminately, has money by the cash roll, and had zero relationship with his daughter until she was dead… at which point he starts with the indiscriminate killing. His cop friend Peter (Sahajak Boonthanakit) is the other lead here, with the two of them trying to solve the murder of Angel together. They have a tenuous bond since Peter is still attempting to raise a family and be on the straight and narrow, while Nguyen’s Johnny just kills everyone all the time. While I have to say Nguyen is looking great these days, and wasn’t awful in the role, Johnny is basically a dick; ruining Peter’s life repeatedly, spending G’s, and having no motivation beyond the fact that he’s broken up that his abandoned daughter became a Bangkok prostitute with a heart of gold.
This is the kind of movie where Angel, the dead daughter/prostitute who we’re supposed to care about because every conversation in the movie is about how great she was, is never seen onscreen until the final reveal, in which she’s featured all naked and stuff. There’s this weird dynamic where the movie is trying to titillate you with revenge violence and nudity while also attempting to put you in the shoes of a grieving father who’s mourning the sad life his daughter supposedly ended up living.
And about those conversations. There are so many. I can’t believe how much of this movie was simply Johnny and Peter sitting down at a table somewhere and talking about Angel. Who was she? Who was last seen with her? Which of the various scumbags we’re spending copious screentime with might have ultimately been the one who did her in? There’s no sense of thrill or excitement as the mystery begins to unravel. There are some shoot outs and set pieces that might be considered “action movie-like”. But there are so many more boring conversations, sitting around some table somewhere.
Scott Adkins plays one of the various scumbags that Johnny located and shakes down for information. Gary Daniels plays another. Kane Kosugi is offed by Adkins in a head scrathing opening sequence which seems to establish Adkins’ character’s jealous love for Angel, which could be an indication that he’s the killer, but also kicks off the movie giving one the impression that Adkins will be a major lead in the film. Then he disappears for huge portions of the runtime and at least gets a fight scene in before being swept aside. Gary Daniels, himself an action film leading man, doesn’t even get an action scene. Just a whole bunch of weird dialog sequences that amount to largely nothing except for a few more murders for our “hero” Johnny. Having these three guys in Zero Tolerance was truly the bait that suckered me in to seeing the film. I figured, even if they weren’t leads, they’d get some kickass action moments up against Nguyen before he offed them. But since this isn’t an action movie at all, we really don’t get that. They’re totally fine in their respective roles, but this script from Thai writer/director Wych Kaosayananda (formerly known as “Kaos”, who brought us Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever and Tekken 2) is remarkably lifeless. As such, it isn’t so much outright awful like I’ve always heard Ecks Vs. Sever is (though I haven’t seen it myself so I can’t know for sure), but rather just bland and boring and drawn out. There’s nothing here that hasn’t been seen in dozens of other crime films. We don’t care for the main character because all that we know about him, which isn’t much, is bad.
I highly recommend skipping this film, and because of this, I’ll go ahead and spoil the ending in this paragraph. You’ve been warned. In the end, and I mean the VERY end, we’re treated to a video which solves the mystery as to what actually happened to Angel. This is the part I referenced earlier when she’s all sexualized for her final moment. Her death, mind you. As it turns out, she simply died of an apparent drug overdose mixed with a swimming pool drowning, while surrounded by her best friends who she was partying with and vaguely making out with. She wasn’t murdered at all. So while this makes the point of the film somewhat clearer, that Johnny was, in fact, a huge prick for murdering all these people who didn’t kill his daughter in the first place, it doesn’t retroactively make any of the rest of the film more compelling. There’s some commentary on the futility of revenge, I guess, and that’s fine. But there’s still a fetishization of whatever badass gun violence the film did display, as well as a seedy sexualization of most of the female leads in the film. I don’t mind sex and violence in movies, but Zero Tolerance culminates with a “twist” condemnation of all the killing and sex that has gone on, while still spending the runtime of the film seducing you with those very things. Well, those things and a whole bunch of conversations around a table of some kind about a girl we don’t care about.
I’m coming off super harsh, but I just have to be honest. There’s nothing my man Scott Adkins or any of the other actors could have done to rescue this script. Tighter direction and editing could have made the story snap and pop a little more, but ultimately all that is here is a boring mystery surrounding a dead girl that culminates in a none-too-shocking reveal which, while providing a suitable gut punch to our lead characters, doesn’t have much weight for the audience.
The Package
There’s absolutely nothing to this DVD release. No trailer, no commentary, no bonus features. That’s actually a plus as I didn’t want to spend much more time in this world than I already had. There is a Digital Ultraviolet code for watching on devices, though!
And I’m Out.
Zero Tolerance releases on DVD, Digital HD, and On Demand on December 1st, 2015