Darc is a 2018 thriller about an Interpol agent who recruits the help of a brutal criminal to bring down a global human trafficking ring.
I hesitate to say there is a resurgence in old school vendetta films as they sort of never went away, just kinda found home on late night cable and direct to video releases before the likes of Liam Neeson and Keanu Reeves started making them mainstream again. With Julius R. Nasso‘s newest Darc, its much of the same, featuring a tortured soul with a bitter past who uses his unique skills to right a few wrongs, mixing in some Yakuza and human trafficking along the way. While it has plenty of solid action sequences and no lack of momentum, it doesn’t quite have the innovation to be any more than what it is, an action filler that isn’t all that memorable.
On early release from prison, Darc (Tony Schiena – who also wrote the screenplay) is met by Interpol agent Lafique (Armand Assante), who begs him for help. Seems his daughter has been taken by the Yakuza and he fears the worst. Why does he want Darc? Well, as a kid, back in the late 80s, he was living in a brothel with his mother in Japan, the cliental not the upstanding types, with drug runners and gang members ruling the site. The boy’s favorite comic book hero is the titular Darc, and one day, things go bad for his mom, and he witnesses the worst a child can, shaping his future. He knows the seedy underworld where taken girls end up. Now on a mission to save Lafique’s daughter – and make clean his past – he goes deep into the Yakuza family to bring the pain.
So we’re playing with an already limited deck here, these kinds of films an A,B,C of storytelling that rely on its action set-pieces to pad it to feature length. In the right hands, there’s nothing wrong with that, if we feel some connection with the good guy. All you have to do is look at what Reeves does with the John Wick series to know how it’s done right. Darc takes a page out that playbook with a brooding, bearded badass who speaks with his fists, smashing a swath of destruction just about everywhere he goes but does so with little impact on the film itself. The fighting is solid but the cardboard around it is all too generic to matter.
In just one evening, Darc manages to get himself an audience with the local Yakuza kingpin, someone Darc knows well, saving the life of a troublesome member who was on the wrong end of a beatdown. Then from there, things click pretty fast, as we move from one been-there-done-that sequence after other, from strip joints and meeting rooms to butcher shops and restaurants. There’s plenty of gunplay and bare-breasted women, but it’s never as compelling as it should be, even if you never want look away.
Not too long ago, Netflix released The Outsider with Jared Leto, another Yakuza-related action flick that took to this story with a somewhat different style. While that film had its hard moments, it was a much more ethereal experience, heavy on style and pondering moments of stillness. Darc, on the other hand, chooses to go for blood, and surely, fans of such may find some promise in the butchery. It’s not a disappointment, but it comes up short, sticking a little too close to the rails.