It offers a mirror image: instead of a son taking revenge for the murder of his father, a father, Hieronimo, takes vengeance on the Spanish court on behalf of his slain son.
Even more than in last year's "In the Bedroom," where a distraught father takes vengeance on a killer the legal system fails to punish, in "Unfaithful" getting away with murder produces surprisingly salutary effects.
He played a middle-class Italian in Mario Monicelli's hard-hitting Un Borghese Piccolo Piccolo (A Very Small Petit Bourgeois), who, after seeing his child killed in a robbery, takes vengeance.
Throughout the rest of the movie, he takes vengeance on the swine who tried to do him in — a rogue unit in the government, operating under the control of a powerful, oil-mad senator from Montana (the Cheney figure, played by Ned Beatty).
In his 2001 play "The Lieutenant of Inishmore," for instance, McDonagh gives us Padraic, a young sociopath from western Ireland who has been rejected by the I.R.A., and who takes vengeance on the people he feels are responsible for society's failings.
Betrayed twice by his country, Mark Wahlberg's Bob Lee Swagger, an ex-Marine, takes vengeance on the swine who tried to do him in — a rogue unit in the government, operating under the control of a powerful, oil-mad senator from Montana (a Dick Cheney-like figure, played by Ned Beatty).
