Diablo Review

Diablo is now playing in select theaters and available on demand and on digitial.

How best to describe the way Scott Adkins moves? The way he hangs in the air, twists mid-strike, and executes a kick to some dude's face, you'd swear he's a cobra that learned ballet – graceful, lethal, and awesome to watch. Diablo finds the 48-year-old action star (and one-time member of John Wick's High Table) in reliably nimble form, even if his latest character seems to be throwing those fists of fury with newfound restraint. Adkins plays Kris, a reformed bank robber smuggled into Colombia to rescue the tempestuous teen Elisa (Alana De La Rossa) from the clutches of her father, Vicente (Lucho Velasco) – who also happens to be Kris' sworn enemy and one-time partner-in-crime. (These things tend to overlap.) While Kris is willing to beat some serious ass in the process, it's fun to see a dash of reluctance added to Adkins' repertoire of endlessly thrilling VOD donnybrooks.

And, it seems, age. Diablo kicks off with Kris at an impasse with armed mules demanding extra cash for getting him across the border. Kris obliges, but his punches don't land with the finality he expects. You can see frustration and exhaustion on Adkins' face; Kris is giving his all, but these guys just keep getting up. Don't worry: He still walks away the victor, off to find redemption and retribution in equal doses. Adkins, who shares story credit on Diablo, is clearly in on the joke of a veteran martial artist coming to grips with his own mortality.

Kris' mission is a tricky enough endeavor without the added complication that Elisa doesn't seem to want saving. Though De la Rossa offers glimmers of caution whenever she's in a room with her movie dad, her character has long grown accustomed to the spoils of Vicente’s cartel life. From the jump, and after a few wild kicks to Kris’s head, it's clear Elisa has zero intention of being anyone's hostage – not this stoic lunatic decked out in Rambo’s jacket from First Blood, and certainly not anyone else's.

Diablo is directed and edited by Chilean filmmaker Ernesto Díaz Espinoza, who has a clear knack for grindhouse brutality even if his quieter moments lack the grit and atmosphere that his rowdier sequences have in abundance. Still, he doesn't come up short in terms of pulp silliness. With screenwriter Mat Sansom, Espinoza conjures a formidable and memorable adversary for our world-weary hero: El Corvo (Marko Zaror, who previously starred in Espinoza's martial arts thriller Redeemer), an ice-cold serial killer/hired heavy straight out of the Cannon stable of baddies. Equipped with a wicked prosthetic fist/razor-sharp dagger combo, El Corvo shares and even surpasses Kris' ability to walk away from every fight, regardless of the odds. One mid-film melee sees the heavy entering a club and flooring everyone in his path; in another stunning moment, he dispatches an opponent so forcefully that the baseball bat his quarry was wielding spins in mid-air like a ceiling fan.

Naturally, El Corvo's objective is also to retrieve Elisa, and he, like Kris, has reasons for taking the job that hearken back to Vicente's darker days. As a typical movie maniac, El Corvo is not infallible; his tendency to woo his victims-to-be with treats (adopting a Dale Cooper philosophy of giving yourself a present once a day) can blunt his sinister effectiveness. And he conveniently loses his immaculate John Wick marksmanship whenever his crosshairs are trained on Kris. He also takes a page from the diabolical supervillain book, assembling an excruciatingly protracted death-trap finale where Adkins and Zaror tear into each other, unstoppable-force meets-immovable-object style, seemingly oblivious that Elisa is dangling nearby in mortal danger.

If Diablo has another flaw, it's the one found in some of Adkins' lesser outings: the script barrels through the particulars, with characters and motivations only sketched out enough to justify the next fight scene. That's hardly anything to gripe about, given how solid those fights turn out to be. And there's something awesome about how the personal stakes (which only grow more personal as Diablo goes on) of the story free Adkins to modulate his action-man brawniness for something slightly more restrained and mature. While Diablo remains eminently watchable martial arts schlock and may not offer as blistering a role for the actor as, say, 2019’s Avengement, it gives him a chance to display the many dimensions of his onscreen prowess, revealing hints of regret, guilt, and even more subtly, the wear and tear of age. Adkins still piles up KO after KO in Diablo, but after years of cutting through bad guys like a finely honed blade, it’s nice to see him portray the rust that’s built up under the sheath.