In the opening scene of Avengement, a police car glides towards us, as though one with the crooning plaintive theme song. Having pulled up to the parking lot, the camera pans back onto the driveway to reveal a second police car trailing a paddy wagon. At the back of the wagon sits a man in handcuffs. In a wide shot, a St. Lourdes Hospital signpost fills us in on what this place is, and—a moment later from a doctor waiting in the lobby—why he is furloughed here. It turns out that this man named Burgess (Scott Adkins) is here to see his dying (actually, though unknown to him prior to this trip, already dead) mother, a beat that makes this scene the entire film’s most emotional moment. Incandescent with a rage oftentimes quelled by the freighted wherewithal of pain, he finds himself standing beside the cold slab that bears her dead weight.

So potent is this beginning that were it transposed elsewhere—say, in the second half of the film as a flashback or a mere exposition, a practical possibility given the non-linear structure of the film’s narrative—Avengement, though unchanged substantially, wouldn’t be as profound. Especially with how tragically it ends, this scene not only moves us by the elegiac tone it sets for the rest of the film, but as is wont of some death scenes, it also moves forward the plot.

Avengement follows Cain Burgess, an indignant fugitive who, while seeking to find and redeem himself, holds court in a private bar—a front for loan sharks he intends to get even with for his incarceration. And since Avengement, inspired by Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri (1962), is “a film reflecting situational ethics, in which the better you know a man the more deeply you understand his motives,” Burgess slowly but surely endears himself to the viewer by assuming the role of a raconteur pertinent to their understanding of his side of the story. Save for a collation of organic flashbacks at the ready to make up for the intentional inadequacies characteristic of a story beginning in medias res, these events play out in their entirety here, doing so to the divulgence of the film’s very own kind of origin.

Shelved by its eventual director Jesse V. Johnson for so long that upon being greenlit Stu Small had to update and adapt its essentials to the sonic sensibilities of Adkins, his childhood friend, the screenplay from which Avengement is made—just like that of a host of other indie films—happens to be contained. Even so, this constraint, as though it were imposed on a mainstream chamber movie to which it is insusceptible, never quite feels like the artistic obligation it is supposed to be. This exemption can be chalked up to a rare balancing act struck by the film’s lean budget, which, besides lying within the filmmakers’ means, meets the needs of the story, powerful enough to cast what usually brings about this kind of film into a shadow of its characters’ individual journeys. This story, imbued with an inextricable undertone, has become germane to a setting whose limitations it transcends; with it, in an out-of-the-box way of thinking given the uncommon aperçu of the screenplay from which their varied characters are drawn, those who bring it to life.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said about the stories and characters in Adkins’ earlier films. As is often the case with most action films, they are obsessed with holism. For example, take the second, third, and fourth films in the Undisputed franchise; though one of the better films in his expansive oeuvre, their stories and characters are nothing to write home about. Even the popularity of their antagonist-cum-protagonist Yuri Boyka (Adkins) can’t be attributed to him being a complete character, but rather, like most of the characters Adkins has previously portrayed, to him being “the most complete fighter in the world.” Fair enough, as not much can be expected from a franchise that has been in the business of selling itself short since its inception, aspiring to be—according to a Rotten Tomatoes critical consensus on its original film—“nothing more than a genre picture.” This is an opinion that the direct-to-video sequels, something of an Adkins’ specialty, seem to have taken to heart.

Yet for Adkins, Johnson, and director-cum-producer Isaac Florentine, the actor’s 16-time collaborators, this is excusable. With a background in stunts, their wheelhouse, it was only ordinary for the triad’s earlier filmmaking efforts to be focused on the action—the very reason Adkins, primarily an actor, is to this day still being referred to first as a martial artist in certain artistic circles, a fact recently highlighted by his wins for Best Fight and Best Achievement in Stunts Overall at Vulture’s inaugural Stunt Awards. Be that as it may, this collection of Adkins’ earlier films, of course not without a silver lining, boasts to a keen eye tiny flashes of dramatic brilliance, devoid of which, in their entirety, Avengement—even if it was always meant to be—would never have become the kind of film that it is.

As such, with Avengement has come a tipping point for Adkins’ career. Making all the difference is the story—previously a seemingly holy grail, but finally honed in on here. Unlike before when those other films’ departments would be self-serving, in Avengement they—although fully aware of their own limits—are in complete service of the story. Every time Avengement becomes more of a still photograph than a motion picture, by virtue of its occasionally lingering cinematography, focus has to be racked away from the quasi-photograph’s dull background and back onto Adkins, who—through a series of long takes stemming from a middling-paced editing from Matthew Lorentz—goes all out dramatically.

Though what this kind of camerawork may lack in pace—a striking oddity for a film billed as action—it makes up for in its interior scenes’ gloomy palette, whose gray colour says, albeit metaphorically, something about why Avengement works. While the film is at its heart an exploration of dualism, it doesn’t conform to the idea of Manichaeism. Heck, even the imperative questions it raises are anything but polar. What it is particularly interested in are the gray areas that make for these little pockets of conflicted emotions into which Adkins—whenever Burgess has to tap into the redemption treasured between a tortured self breeding violence and an empathetic soul exuding kindness—disappears, soon after emerging with an emotive version of an anti-hero different from the typically stoic ones portrayed in many an action film released today.

That’s not to say that Avengement is a perfect film— far from it. Being a pastiche, although not exactly a travesty, it hardly breaks any new ground. But despite this apocryphalness, a mere blemish in an otherwise outstanding artistic achievement, Avengement deserves to be seen and celebrated for what it really is— a wonderful little film with a huge heart.