Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Vindicta’ on Paramount+, a Serial Killer Thriller Aiming For ‘Seven’-Style Chills

A potential frontrunner for 2023’s worst movie is Vindicta (now streaming on Paramount+), a slasher/mystery/thriller about a serial killer who, as the title implies, knows Latin. Good thing our protagonist, a rookie paramedic, also knows Latin – AND jiu jitsu! Sean McNamara (Soul Surfer) directs and Elena Kampouris (of My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 and 3) headlines this howler that aims for grimness ‘n’ gore but inspires little more than derisive laughter. Unless it’s one of those movies that’s bad on purpose, but really, who can tell anymore? 

VINDICTA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: SEATTLE. Riots have torn the city apart. I mean, this borough looks like a chintzy-ass backlot tossed to resemble a war zone. Homeless people wander the streets dazed and bleeding. Gasmasked loons roam willy-nilly. A woman with crazed eyes smokes crack out in the open. It’s as if someone took a Fox News pundit’s distorted belief of what life in a densely populated city is like and made it a movie set. It’s such a miserable scene, paramedics just drive in and park and start patching people up. Of course it’s Lou’s (Kampouris) first day in the ambulance, so she’s in the deep end now, and it’s trial by fire, and I know that’s a mixed metaphor because fire would be doused if it was in the deep end, but this movie is so godawful I have to amuse myself somehow. 

And as a Fox News pundit from the suburbs would feverishly imagine in their self-fondling dreams, this grotesque caricature of urban existence is fertile grounds for a hulking, masked serial slasher to commit evil deeds out in the open with little recourse. He burns a fire dept. inspector alive, and decapitates a guy and uses his head as a puppet. Then he jams a medieval torture device into the mouth of a TV news reporter and lets her mutilated corpse lie on the sidewalk for poor Lou to find. This is exactly what Lou’s dad (Jeremy Piven), a retired cop, was worried about when she took the job, but hey, at least she knows jiu jitsu, he takes pains to reveal in the dialogue, so we’re not surprised later when she finds herself in a pickle or two and shows capability of making a slick self-defensive move. 

She’s quite the individual, this Lou. She also knows Latin, which helps because the killer scrawls Latin words on crime scenes – IN BLOOD. She also also knows Mandarin, which helps when the killer slashes a woman’s throat in a convenience store run by a Chinese woman. So, in summary: Lou is not your average Mandarin- and Latin-knowing jiu jitsu artist-slash-paramedic, and if this movie needs anything, it’s a Mandarin- and Latin-knowing jiu jitsu artist-slash-paramedic – who’s also a script doctor, which is where she fails it. But hey, she can’t be everything for everyone at all times, right? 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Vindicta is a dozen-times mimeographed version of Se7en crossed with Bringing Out the Dead crossed with, I dunno, The Midnight Meat Train or something.

Performance Worth Watching: Kampouris is essentially trapped here, caught between a cliché-ridden script and a budget that wouldn’t be too difficult to count out in nickels. But she works hard to bring the film some intensity even when it’s a futile endeavor.

Memorable Dialogue: Get a load of this doozy: “Jason, in about 10 seconds there’s a category eight tornado of human shit that’s about to hit us, and I don’t feel like swimming in shit today!” – Lou

Sex and Skin: A shower-stalker scene doesn’t show any nudity, so the SEX PRUDES out there can rest easy knowing that Vindicta is only a shamelessly disgusting gorefest, and not a shamelessly disgusting gorefest with a highly offensive unclothed boob in it.

Our Take: Vindicta is witless, moronic, tasteless, logic-challenged, amateurish dreck that’s all but daring you not to guffaw in its face. We get cheeseball flashbacks that telegraph the Big Reveal, chintzy FX, papier-mache characters, garbage dialogue and an antagonist who’s a caricature of a caricature of a serial killer. He wears a mask of Michelangelo’s David inside a black hoodie, speaks in a distorted voice and has a ghastly lair full of beat-up mannequins and photos of – gasp, I tell you, gasp – Lou and her dad. Bet you didn’t see that coming! This guy is so predictable and laughably unthreatening, he makes the Shropshire Slasher look like Hannibal Lecter.

It may be more compelling to peruse McNamara’s filmography as a director: Soul Surfer, Disney Channel stuff, direct-to-video Casper the Friendly Ghost movies, Baby Geniuses sequels and TV episodes, a Hillary Duff vehicle from 2004, a movie based on Bratz dolls. It’s safe to say Vindicta is a change of pace for him in terms of lighting and tone, both of which tend to be rather dim. Same goes for the intelligence of the screenplay by Steven Paul and Ian Neligh, who took a young-woman-trying-to-prove-herself character arc and dropped it into a serial-killer-leaves-shocking-clues plot and set it against the backdrop of a city in great civil turmoil, and the result is clunky, pointless, knuckleheaded and deeply, deeply silly. And boring! So boring. The only good bit is that line about the shit tornado, because it’s when the movie unwittingly engages in accurate self-description. 

Our Call: SKIP IT. (If you made it this far, you know all the reasons why.)

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.